Probing leaky and guided exciton-polaritons in resonant planar structures

Anton Samusev

ITMO University

Planar periodic structures such as metasurfaces and photonic crystal slabs strongly coupled to an exciton resonance attract particular attention since they provide vast opportunities for on-demand engineering of the dispersion of guided and leaky polariton resonances. In this regard, experimental characterization and control of the over modes’ dispersion is of great importance. In this talk, I will show both what new physical phenomena appear in such systems and how these effects can be directly observed in the experiment.

In the first part of the talk, I will show an experimental approach allowing to retrieve the real [1, 2] or even full complex [3] dispersion of both leaky and evanescent waves in arbitrary planar structures. The method is based on back focal plane microspectroscopy combined with a solid immersion lens (SIL) separated from the sample by a precisely controlled nanoscale air gap (Otto geometry). Varying the gap allows for extracting both real and imaginary parts of the wavenumber of surface waves propagating in an arbitrary in-plane direction.

In the second part of the talk, I will switch gears to another implication of dispersion engineering in planar structures – the possibility of realization of strong light-matter coupling regime with excitons in transition metal dichalcogenides [4, 5] and perovskites [6]. I will highlight the nonlinear [4, 6] and topological [5] properties of exciton polaritons in such systems enabled by finely tuned custom designs of the photonic band structure.

Finally, we will discuss how to directly observe and analyze guided exciton-polaritons in planar waveguides either made of a perovskite or based on high-index dielectric slab integrated with transition metal dichalcogenide monolayer. I will show how direct variation of radiative losses via changing the SIL-sample distance in such systems allows for the control of Rabi splitting, and extraction of exciton-photon coupling strength along with the intrinsic properties of excitons in the sample under study.

References
1. Pidgayko, D., Sinev, I., Permyakov, D., Sychev, S., Heyroth, F., Rutckaia, V., Schilling J., Lavrinenko A., Bogdanov A. and Samusev, A., “Direct imaging of isofrequency contours of guided modes in extremely anisotropic all-dielectric metasurface”, ACS Photonics, Vol. 6, No 2, 510-515, 2018.
2. Permyakov, D. V., Sinev, I. S., Sychev, S. K., Gudovskikh, A. S., Bogdanov, A. A., Lavrinenko, A. V. and Samusev, A. K., “Visualization of isofrequency contours of strongly localized waveguide modes in planar dielectric structures”, JETP Letters, vol. 107, No 1, 10-14, 2018.
3. Permyakov, D. V., Kondratiev, V. I., Pidgayko, D. A., Sinev, I. S. and Samusev, A. K., “Probing Optical Losses and Dispersion of Fully Guided Waves through Critical Evanescent Coupling”, JETP Letters, vol. 113, No 12, 780-786, 2021.
4. Kravtsov, V., Khestanova, E., Benimetskiy, F. A., Ivanova, T., Samusev, A. K., Sinev, I. S., Pidgayko, D. A, Mozharov, A. M., Mukhin, I. S., Lozhkin, M. S., Kapitonov, Yu. V., Brichkin, A. S., Kulakovskii, V. D., Shelykh, I. A., Tartakovskii, A.I., Walker, P. M., Skolnick, M. S., Krizhanovskii , D. N. and Iorsh, I. V., “Nonlinear polaritons in a monolayer semiconductor coupled to optical bound states in the continuum”, Light: Science & Applications, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1-8, 2020.
5. Li, M., Sinev, I., Benimetskiy, F., Ivanova, T., Khestanova, E., Kiriushechkina, S., Vakulenko, A., Guddala, S., Skolnick, M., Menon, V. M., Krizhanovskii, D., Alù, A., Samusev, A. and Khanikaev, A. B., “Experimental observation of topological Z2 exciton-polaritons in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers”, Nature communications, Vol. 12, No 1, 1-10.
6. Masharin, M. A., Shahnazaryan, V. A., Benimetsky, F. A., Krizhanovskii, D. N., Shelykh, I. A., Iorsh, I. V., Makarov S.V. and Samusev, A. K., “Polaron-enhanced polariton nonlinearity in lead halide perovskites”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.10265, 2022

About The Speaker

Anton Samusev holds the position of Assistant Professor at School of Physics and Engineering, ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia. Since the PhD defense in 2011 at Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, he is leading a scientific group currently comprising 3 Assistant Professors, 4 Postdocs, PhD, MS and BS students. The scientific interests of the group lie at the confluence of the fields of nanooptics, solid state and laser physics. The research topics include experimental studies of the near- and far-field properties of optically resonant nanoantennas and metasurfaces weakly or strongly coupled to 2D and 3D materials with pronounced excitonic response (transition metal dichalcogenides, perovskites), dispersion engineering of optical surface waves in structured media, phase change materials, topological photonics, photon emission from tunnel junctions, single-photon emitters and others. Since 2017 Anton lectures the course “Introduction to Experimental Nanophotonics” within the “Nanophotonics and metamaterials” MS program at ITMO University.

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