Visualizing Spatial Variations of Plasmon-Exciton Polaritons at the Nanoscale Using Electron Microscopy.

Polaritons are compositional light-matter quasiparticles that have enabled remarkable breakthroughs in quantum and nonlinear optics, as well as in material science. Recently, plasmon-exciton polaritons (plexcitons) have been realized in hybrid material systems composed of transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) materials and metal nanoparticles, expanding polaritonic concepts to room temperature and nanoscale systems that also benefit from the exotic properties of TMDC materials. Despite the enormous progress in understanding TMDC-based plexcitons using optical-based methods, experimental evidence of plexcitons formation has remained indirect and mapping their nanometer-scale characteristics has remained an open challenge.

Transition metal dichalcogenide nanodisks as high-index dielectric Mie nanoresonators.

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have recently been proposed as an excitonic platform for advanced optical and electronic functionalities. However, in spite of intense research efforts, it has not been widely appreciated that TMDCs also possess a high refractive index. This characteristic opens up the possibility to utilize them to construct resonant nanoantennas based on subwavelength geometrical modes.

Collective Strong Light-Matter Coupling in Hierarchical Microcavity-Plasmon-Exciton Systems.

Polaritons are compositional light-matter quasiparticles that arise as a result of strong coupling between the vacuum field of a resonant optical cavity and electronic excitations in quantum emitters. Reaching such a regime is often hard, as it requires materials possessing high oscillator strengths to interact with the relevant optical mode. Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have recently emerged as promising candidates for realization of strong coupling regime at room temperature.

Strong Light-Matter Coupling between Plasmons in Individual Gold Bi-pyramids and Excitons in Mono- and Multilayer WSe.

Monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have attracted a lot of research attention recently, motivated by their remarkable optical properties and potential for strong light-matter interactions. Realization of strong plasmon-exciton coupling is especially desirable in this context because it holds promise for the enabling of room-temperature quantum and nonlinear optical applications. These efforts naturally require investigations at a single-nanoantenna level, which, in turn, should possess a compact optical mode interacting with a small amount of excitonic material.

Observation of Tunable Charged Exciton Polaritons in Hybrid Monolayer WS-Plasmonic Nanoantenna System.

Formation of dressed light-matter states in optical structures, manifested as Rabi splitting of the eigen energies of a coupled system, is one of the key effects in quantum optics. In pursuing this regime with semiconductors, light is usually made to interact with excitons, electrically neutral quasiparticles of semiconductors; meanwhile interactions with charged three-particle states, trions, have received little attention. Here, we report on strong interaction between localized surface plasmons in silver nanoprisms and excitons and trions in monolayer tungsten disulfide (WS).

Zeeman splitting via spin-valley-layer coupling in bilayer MoTe.

Atomically thin monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides possess coupling of spin and valley degrees of freedom. The chirality is locked to identical valleys as a consequence of spin-orbit coupling and inversion symmetry breaking, leading to a valley analog of the Zeeman effect in presence of an out-of-plane magnetic field. Owing to the inversion symmetry in bilayers, the photoluminescence helicity should no longer be locked to the valleys.

Observation of Mode Splitting in Photoluminescence of Individual Plasmonic Nanoparticles Strongly Coupled to Molecular Excitons.

Plasmon-exciton interactions are important for many prominent spectroscopic applications such as surface-enhanced Raman scattering, plasmon-mediated fluorescence, nanoscale lasing, and strong coupling. The case of strong coupling is analogous to quantum optical effects studied in solid state and atomic systems previously. In plasmonics, similar observations have been almost exclusively made in elastic scattering experiments; however, the interpretation of these experiments is often cumbersome.