Demonstration of dipolar-induced enhancement of parametric effects in polariton waveguides

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that inducing aligned electric dipoles in exciton-polaritons within waveguides significantly enhances their nonlinear optical effects, providing direct experimental evidence of dipolar-induced interaction enhancement.

Contribution

It provides the first direct experimental measurement of dipolar enhancement of polariton-polariton interactions in waveguide structures.

Findings

Dipolar interactions increase parametric effects like self-phase modulation.

Experimental evidence of enhanced polariton-polariton interactions due to dipoles.

Quantitative measurement of nonlinear optical enhancements.

Abstract

Exciton-polaritons are hybrid light-matter excitations arising from the non-perturbative coupling of a photonic mode and an excitonic resonance. Behaving as interacting photons, they show optical third-order nonlinearities providing effects such as optical parametric oscillation or amplification. It has been suggested that polariton-polariton interactions can be greatly enhanced by inducing aligned electric dipoles in their excitonic part. However direct evidence of a true particle-particle interaction, such as superfluidity or parametric scattering is still missing. In this work, we demonstrate that dipolar interactions can be used to enhance parametric effects such as self-phase modulation in waveguide polaritons. By quantifying these optical nonlinearities we provide a reliable experimental measurement of the direct dipolar enhancement of polariton-polariton interactions.