Giant optical nonlinearities from Rydberg excitons in semiconductor microcavities

Valentin Walther (), Robert Johne and Thomas Pohl
Additional contact information
Valentin Walther: Aarhus University
Robert Johne: Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems
Thomas Pohl: Aarhus University

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract The realization of exciton polaritons—hybrid excitations of semiconductor quantum well excitons and cavity photons—has been of great technological and scientific significance. In particular, the short-range collisional interaction between excitons has enabled explorations into a wealth of nonequilibrium and hydrodynamical effects that arise in weakly nonlinear polariton condensates. Yet, the ability to enhance optical nonlinearities would enable quantum photonics applications and open up a new realm of photonic many-body physics in a scalable and engineerable solid-state environment. Here we outline a route to such capabilities in cavity-coupled semiconductors by exploiting the giant interactions between excitons in Rydberg states. We demonstrate that optical nonlinearities in such systems can be vastly enhanced by several orders of magnitude and induce nonlinear processes at the level of single photons.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03742-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-03742-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03742-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().