Artistic depiction of a hybrid polaritonic ground state in a WSe2 loaded cavity. Source: Nat. Comms.
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2D-Materials with a New Trick Up Their Sleeve

Polaritons in WSe2 from a new Hybrid Light-Matter Ground State
Artistic depiction of a hybrid polaritonic ground state in a WSe2 loaded cavity. Source: Nat. Comms.
Image: Christian Schneider

Published:

Customized Bragg-cavity resonators with embedded 2D-Materials are the backbone of nonlinear integrated devices and polaritonics.

Customized Bragg-cavity resonators with embedded 2D-Materials are the backbone of nonlinear integrated devices and polaritonics.

Image: Heiko Knopf

 In "Brightening of a dark monolayer semiconductor via strong light-matter coupling in a cavity | Nature CommunicationsExternal link​" we show that the strong coupling to a cavity mode lowers the energy of a polariton mode so much, it becomes the new ground state. This enhances emission efficiency by more than an order of magnitude. Moreover, we now have a system with a hybrid light-matter ground state; lots of exciting quantumphysics to discover.

Congrats to the team of Hangyong Shan and Christian Schneider of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, who spearheaded this research, with contributions from ITMO University, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Arizona State University, National Institute for Materials Science, and the Háskóli Íslands. The Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, the Fraunhofer IOF, and the Max Planck School of Photonics contributed to this work with Dr. Heiko Knopf's amazing custom-coated TMD-cavities.

For more infos, please also check Uni Oldenburg's press statementExternal link.