Relativity and diversity of strong coupling in coupled plasmon-exciton systems
Renming Liu, Zeyang Liao, Yi-Cong Yu, Xuehua Wang
Abstract
Strong coupling between quantum emitters and photonic modes, at which the level splitting (LS) of the mixed quantum states occurs, has aroused great interest due to diverse important quantum applications. The spectral Rabi-splitting (SRS) in photon emission or absorption has been extensively used to characterize strong coupling based on the equality assumption by assigning the SRS to LS. Here, we demonstrate that the equality assumption is usually invalid via a unified quantum treatment on the coupled plasmon-exciton system. It is revealed that the strong coupling characterized by the SRS is easily observed from the subsystem with larger decay, manifesting itself in relativity and diversity, which is highly correlated to the dissipative decays of the coupling subsystems. The plasmon-exciton interactions can be classified into the weak coupling, pseudo-, dark-, intermediate- and super-strong coupling regimes. Our work not only enriches the underlying physics of strong light-matter interactions, but also may stimulate further experimental researches in this field.