Polariton-Enhanced Exciton Transport

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that excitons with slight polaritonic character in 2D cavity structures can travel much farther than previously thought, impacting the design of polaritonic devices and interaction measurements.

Contribution

It reveals that slightly polaritonic excitons can have transport distances around 20 micrometers, much longer than the previously assumed sub-micrometer scale.

Findings

Excitons with slight polaritonic character can travel approximately 20 micrometers.

Such excitons can outnumber polaritons at lower energies.

Implications for potential landscape design and interaction measurement in polariton systems.

Abstract

The transport distance of excitons in exciton-polariton systems has previously been assumed to be very small ($\lesssim 1~\mu$m). The sharp spatial profiles observed when generating polaritons by non-resonant optical excitation show that this assumption is generally true. In this paper, however, we show that the transport distances of excitons in two-dimensional planar cavity structures with even a slightly polaritonic character are much longer than expected ($\approx 20~\mu$m). Although this population of slightly polaritonic excitons is normally small compared to the total population of excitons, they can substantially outnumber the population of the polaritons at lower energies, leading to important implications for the tailoring of potential landscapes and the measurement of interactions between polaritons.