Intercavity polariton slows down dynamics in strongly coupled cavities

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates room-temperature intercavity Frenkel polaritons in strongly coupled cavities, enabling slow-light-like behavior and revealing a dynamical competition that increases fluorescence lifetime and suppresses fluorescence under resonant pumping.

Contribution

It introduces a novel photonic architecture with tunable heavy-polaritons in a simple three-level scheme without a periodic potential.

Findings

Observation of a tunable slow-light-like polariton

Increased fluorescence lifetime due to many-body interactions

Suppressed fluorescence intensity under resonant pumping

Abstract

Band engineering stands as an efficient route to induce strongly correlated quantum many-body phenomena. Besides inspiring analogies among diverse physical fields, tuning on demand the group velocity is highly attractive in photonics because it allows unconventional flows of light. $\Lambda$-schemes offer a route to control the propagation of light in a lattice-free configurations, enabling exotic phases such as slow-light and allowing for highly optical non-linear systems. Here, we realize room-temperature intercavity Frenkel polaritons excited across two strongly coupled cavities. We demonstrate the formation of a tuneable heavy-polariton, akin to slow light, appearing in the absence of a periodic in-plane potential. Our photonic architecture based on a simple three-level scheme enables the unique spatial segregation of photons and excitons in different cavities and maintains a balanced degree of mixing between them. This unveils a dynamical competition between many-body scattering processes and the underlying polariton nature which leads to an increased fluorescence lifetime. The intercavity polariton features are further revealed under appropriate resonant pumping, where we observe suppression of the polariton fluorescence intensity.