Highly nonlinear trion-polaritons in a monolayer semiconductor
Emmanuele, R.P.A., Sich, M., Kyriienko, O., Shahnazaryan, V., Withers, F., Catanzaro, A., Walker, P.M., Benimetskiy, F.A., Skolnick, M.S., Tartakovskii, A.I., Shelykh, I.A., Krizhanovskii, D.N.
Abstract
Highly nonlinear optical materials with strong effective photon-photon interactions are required for ultrafast and quantum optical signal processing circuitry. Here we report strong Kerr-like nonlinearities by employing efficient optical transitions of charged excitons (trions) observed in semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). By hybridising trions in monolayer MoSe2 at low electron densities with a microcavity mode, we realise trion-polaritons exhibiting significant energy shifts at small photon fluxes due to phase space filling. We find the ratio of trion- to neutral exciton–polariton interaction strength is in the range from 10 to 100 in TMDC materials and that trion-polariton nonlinearity is comparable to that in other polariton systems. The results are in good agreement with a theory accounting for the composite nature of excitons and trions and deviation of their statistics from that of ideal bosons and fermions. Our findings open a way to scalable quantum optics applications with TMDCs.