Room Temperature Strong Coupling between 2D Material Excitons and One Dimensional Photonic Crystals

Long Zhang, Rahul Gogna, Will Burg, Emanuel Tutuc, Hui Deng

Published 2017-06-26Version 1

Photonic crystals (PCs) and strongly coupled light-matter systems, or polaritons, are two frontiers of modern photonics. One allows versatile optical-mode control and integration, the other, large nonlinearity and spontaneous coherence. Combining them, however, has been difficult, as conventional active media need to be lattice-matched to PCs and protected from detrimental interfaces. We circumvent such difficulty using atomically-thin van der Waals crystals (vdWCs) that interact strongly with light and integrate with structures irrespective of their lattice constants. We observe vdWC-PC polaritons up to the room temperature, measured via anti-crossing in the energy- momentum dispersions of the polaritons. We show that these vdWC-PC polaritons feature unusual anisotropic dispersions, highly adjustable Fano resonances in reflectance, and strongly suppressed non-radiative decay to dark excitons. The unprecedented engineering flexibility of vdWC-PC polariton system will open doors to new nonlinear phenomena and novel integrated quantum photonic devices.