Abstract
Recent experiments have demonstrated strong light–matter coupling between electromagnetic nanoresonators and pristine sheets of two-dimensional semiconductors, and it has been speculated whether these systems can enter the quantum regime operating at the few-polariton level. To address this question, we present a microscopic quantum theory for the interaction between excitons in a sheet of two-dimensional material and a localized electromagnetic resonator. We find that the light–matter interaction breaks the symmetry of the otherwise translation-invariant system and thereby effectively generates a localized exciton mode, which is coupled to an environment of residual exciton modes. This dissipative coupling increases with tighter lateral confinement, and our analysis reveals this to be a potential challenge in realizing nonlinear exciton-exciton interaction. Nonetheless, we predict that polariton blockade due to nonlinear exciton-exciton interactions is well within reach for nanoresonators coupled to transition-metal dichalcogenides, provided that the lateral confinement can be sufficiently tight to make the nonlinearity overcome the polariton dephasing caused by phonon interactions.
- Received 26 March 2021
- Revised 13 January 2022
- Accepted 14 January 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L012020
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society