Protecting Intercavity Polaritons in Strongly Coupled Cavities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to protect intercavity exciton-polaritons in strongly coupled optical cavities, enhancing their robustness and tunability for advanced photonic applications.

Contribution

The work presents a theoretical design and experimental demonstration of a protection mechanism for intercavity polaritons using a $\\Lambda$-scheme energy landscape.

Findings

Intercavity polaritons exhibit robustness over a wide momentum range.

Protection mechanism maintains photon-exciton mixing and spatial separation.

A connection between transparency windows and polariton protection is established.

Abstract

We theoretically designed and experimentally demonstrated a mechanism to protect a spatially segregated mixed light-matter state, known as intercavity exciton-polariton in strongly coupled optical cavities. This excitation, shared across the coupled cavity array, exhibits remarkable robustness over a wide momentum range, without compromising photon-exciton mixing or the spatial separation of its photonic and excitonic components, which also enables a tunable heavy mass. Additionally, we unveil a direct connection between the transparency window, characteristic of slow-light experiments, and the protection of the intercavity polariton nature. Both phenomena originate from the strategic design of an energy-level landscape featuring a $\Lambda$-scheme, opening new avenues for exploring and utilizing these unique optical excitations in advanced photonic applications.