De Liberato, Simone

Date:    Thursday, Dec 9, 2021
Time:   09:30
Place:   scheduled Zoom meeting
Host:    Giacomo Scalari

Tuning material properties via light-matter hybridization

Simone De Liberato
University of Southampton, United Kingdom

In this talk, I will discuss different ways to exploit the hybridization between light and matter in solid-state devices to modify the properties of the host material. I will begin by demonstrating how coupling with the photonic field of a microcavity can substantially change the electronic wavefunctions of Wannier excitons in undoped semiconductor quantum wells [1] and create bound excitons in doped ones [2,3]. I will then discuss how hybridization of longitudinal and transverse degrees of freedom in polar dielectrics, due to crystalline structure [4] or nano-structuring [5], can alter the mid-infrared optical response of semiconductor heterostructures [6,7]. Finally, I will present some recent theoretical results showing how such longitudinal-transverse hybridization can lead to far-field resonant mid-infrared photon emission from electric currents.

[1] S. Brodbeck et al., Physical Review Letters 119, 027401 (2017)
[2] E. Cortese et al., Optica 6, 354 (2019)
[3] E. Cortese et al., Nature Physics 17, 31 (2021)
[4] C. R. Gubbin et al., Nature Communications 10, 1682 (2019)
[5] C. R. Gubbin and S. De Liberato, Physical Review X 10, 021027 (2020)
[6] C. R. Gubbin, S. De Liberato, Physical Review B 102, 235301 (2020)
[7] C. R. Gubbin, S. De Liberato, Physical Review B 102, 201302 (2020)