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Polariton

The Polariton is a quasi-particle in condensed matter systems, where it describes the superposition of an excitation—typically an exciton (itself the quasi-particle that arises from binding a solid-state electron with a valence hole)[1]—with a photon.

The concept was first proposed theoretically, and christened, by John Hopfield[2], and its most fruitful implementation, in 2D, was discovered experimentally during a sabbatical stay in Arakawa's group in Tokyo by Claude Weisbuch.[3] Weisbuch did not initially recognized it as a Hopfield polariton, or "bulk polariton", for which the photon is delocalized in the full 3D crystal, but as a cavity QED effect (Weisbuch was in fact already a polariton expert, having reported its first resonant observation 15 years earlier[4]). The situation was quickly settled during the July (1993) Erice Summer School on "Confined Electrons and Photons: New Physics and Applications" which featured «heated sessions (involving in particular the two Elis, Eli Burstein and Eli Yablonovitch) on the nature of these excitations» according to Weisbuch himself.[5] The name of "Cavity-Polariton" was then agreed to well describe Hopfield's counterpart in reduced dimensionality, and be more suitable than Weisbuch's initial choice for Rabi splitting:

The term "vacuum field Rabi splitting" has so far been used for semiconductor microcavities in analogy to atomic physics where this effect was first observed. From a solid state physics point of view, where dispersion has to be considered, the term "cavity-polariton" is more appropriate.
—R. Houdré, R.P. Stanley and U. Oesterle, 🕮Confined Electrons and Photons: New Physics and Applications. Claude Weisbuch and Elias Burstein (Editors). Springer, 1995. [ISBN: 978-1-4613-5807-7]

It seems that the theorists who should have predicted cavity-polaritons are C. Andreani et al.,[6] who narrowly missed it by overlooking the dimensionality mismatch could be fixed with a cavity.

To do

A historical review of the polariton concept, from Hopfield's lone-warrior paper[2] that gets all the credit despite fairly serious variations with the finally adopted results, along with other contributions.[7][8]

References

  1. ↑ Excitons in crystals. F. P. Laussy and A. Kavokin in Encycl. Cond. Mat. Phys. 3:706 (2024). 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Theory of the Contribution of Excitons to the Complex Dielectric Constant of Crystals. J. J. Hopfield in Phys. Rev. 112:1555 (1958).
  3. ↑ Observation of the coupled exciton-photon mode splitting in a semiconductor quantum microcavity. C. Weisbuch, M. Nishioka, A. Ishikawa and Y. Arakawa in Phys. Rev. Lett. 69:3314 (1992).
  4. ↑ Resonant Polariton Fluorescence in Gallium Arsenide. C. Weisbuch and R. G. Ulbrich in Phys. Rev. Lett. 39:654 (1977).
  5. ↑ Microcavities in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, École Polytechnique (France) and elsewhere: past, present and future. C. Weisbuch and H. Benisty in Phys. Stat. Sol. B 242:2345 (2005).
  6. ↑ Radiative lifetime of free excitons in quantum wells. L. C. Andreani, F. Tassone and F. Bassani in Solid State Commun. 77:641 (1991).
  7. ↑ On the interaction between the radiation field and ionic crystals. K. Huang in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 208:352 (1951).
  8. ↑ Theory of electromagnetic waves in a crystal in which excitons arise. S. I. Pekar in J. Exp. Th. Phys. [ 33:1022] (1957).