Cavity enhanced transport of excitons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that embedding materials in optical cavities can significantly enhance exciton transport by creating delocalized polariton modes, overcoming disorder-induced transmission suppression, with potential applications in quantum simulators and organic materials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for exciton transport enhancement via cavity-induced polariton modes, contrasting with traditional tunneling-based processes.

Findings

Massive improvement of excitonic wave-packet transmission in cavities

Enhanced steady-state exciton currents under incoherent pumping

Potential for observing phenomena in quantum simulators and experiments

Abstract

We show that exciton-type transport in certain materials can be dramatically modified by their inclusion in an optical cavity: the modification of the electromagnetic vacuum mode structure introduced by the cavity leads to transport via delocalized polariton modes rather than through tunneling processes in the material itself. This can help overcome exponential suppression of transmission properties as a function of the system size in the case of disorder and other imperfections. We exemplify massive improvement of transmission for excitonic wave-packets through a cavity, as well as enhancement of steady-state exciton currents under incoherent pumping. These results may have implications for experiments of exciton transport in disordered organic materials. We propose that the basic phenomena can be observed in quantum simulators made of Rydberg atoms, cold molecules in optical lattices, as well as in experiments with trapped ions.