Topological polaritons from quantum wells in photonic waveguides or microcavities

By Torsten Karzig, C. Bardyn, N. Lindner, G. Refael. 2014

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The interaction between light and matter can give rise to novel topological states. This principle was recently exemplified in Floquet topological insulators, where \emph{classical} light was used to induce a topological electronic band structure. Here, in contrast, we show that mixing \emph{single} photons with excitons can result in new topological polaritonic states --- or"topolaritons". Taken separately, the underlying photons and excitons are topologically trivial. Combined appropriately, however, they give rise to non-trivial polaritonic bands with chiral edge modes allowing for unidirectional polariton propagation. The main ingredient in our construction is an exciton-photon coupling with a phase that winds in momentum space. We demonstrate how this winding emerges from spin-orbit coupling in the electronic system and an applied Zeeman field. We discuss the requirements for obtaining a sizable topological gap in the polariton spectrum, and propose practical ways to realize topolaritons in semiconductor quantum wells and monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd349f88c8f8da506e601f78dec26ea469cdf846

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Valley Zeeman effect in elementary optical excitations of monolayer WSe2 (2014, unknown): “Our results raise the possibility of observing optical excitation induced valley Hall effect in monolayer TMDs or topological states of photons strongly coupled to trion excitations in a microcavity [10].”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “oretical works to propose a Chern insulator based on a polariton lattice in an external magnetic field (Bardyn et al., 2015; Karzig et al., 2015; Nalitov et al., 2015; Yi and Karzig, 2016).”
Exciton-polaritons in lattices: A non-linear photonic simulator (2016, background): “Additionally, either by using their nonlinear character [119,120], or their sensitivity to magnetic fields [121,122], polaritons in a lattice could give rise to chiral edge states with topologically protected transport.”
Type-III and Tilted Dirac Cones Emerging from Flat Bands in Photonic Orbital Graphene (2018, background): “Polaritons are particularly well suited to study these scenarios: Thanks to their excitonic component, they present significant repulsive interactions in the high-density regime, which can be achieved when using a resonant excitation scheme [53]; they are also sensitive to external magnetic fields, ”
Quantum Electrodynamic Control of Matter: Cavity-Enhanced Ferroelectric Phase Transition (2020, background): “[189] T.”
Topological Photonic Quasicrystals: Fractal Topological Spectrum and Protected Transport (2016, background): “exciton polaritons [16], acoustics [17], and phonon systems [18].”
Keldysh field theory for driven open quantum systems (2015, background): “[332] Torsten Karzig, Charles-Edouard Bardyn, Netanel H.”
Topological Phases of Non-Hermitian Systems (2018, unknown): “[34] Torsten Karzig, Charles-Edouard Bardyn, Netanel H.”