Thresholdless coherent light scattering from subband polaritons in a strongly coupled microcavity
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Gambari-2010-Thresholdless cohere.pdf
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Author(s)
Williams, Benjamin S.
Hu, Qing
Gambari, Johannes
Fernandez-Dominguez, Antonio I.
Maier, Stefan A.
Kumar, Sushil
Reno, John L.
Phillips, Chris C.
Date Issued
September 2010
Journal
Physical Review B
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Gambari, Johannes et al. “Thresholdless coherent light scattering from subband polaritons in a strongly coupled microcavity.” Physical Review B 82.12 (2010): 121303. © 2010 The American Physical Society.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study a “strongly coupled” (SC) polariton system formed between the atomlike intersubband transitions in a semiconductor nanostructure and the terahertz optical modes that are localized at the edges of a gold aperture. The polaritons can be excited optically, by incoherent excitation with band-gap radiation, and we find that they also coherently scatter the same input laser, to give strikingly sharp “sideband” (SB) spectral peaks, in the backscattered spectrum. The SB intensity is a sensitive track of the polariton density and they can be detected down to a quantum noise floor that is more than 2500 times lower than the excitation thresholds of comparable quantum cascade laser diodes. Compared with other coherent scattering mechanisms, higher-order SB scattering events are readily observable, and we speculate that if suitably optimized, the effect may find utility in a passive component capable of all-optical wavelength shifting for telecommunications systems.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.82.121303
