Polariton
In physics, polaritons /pəˈlærɪtɒnz, poʊ-/[1] are quasiparticles resulting from strong coupling of electromagnetic waves with an electric or magnetic dipole-carrying excitation. They are an expression of the common quantum phenomenon known as level repulsion, also known as the avoided crossing principle. Polaritons describe the crossing of the dispersion of light with any interacting resonance. The polariton is a bosonic quasiparticle, and should not be confused with the polaron (a fermionic one), which is an electron plus an attached phonon cloud.
Whenever the polariton picture is valid, the model of photons propagating freely in crystals is insufficient. A major feature of polaritons is a strong dependency of the propagation speed of light through the crystal on the frequency. For exciton-polaritons, rich experimental results on various aspects have been gained in copper (I) oxide.
History
Oscillations in ionized gases were observed by Tonks and Langmuir in 1929. Polaritons were first considered theoretically by Tolpygo.[2][3] They were termed light-excitons in Ukrainian and Russian scientific literature. That name was suggested by Pekar, but the term polariton, proposed by Hopfield, was adopted. Coupled states of electromagnetic waves and phonons in ionic crystals and their dispersion relation, now known as phonon polaritons, were obtained by Tolpygo in 1950[2][3] and, independently, by Kun in 1951.[4][5] Collective interactions were published by Pines and Bohm in 1952, and plasmons were described in silver by Fröhlich and Pelzer in 1955. Ritchie predicted surface plasmons in 1957, then Ritchie and Eldridge published experiments and predictions of emitted photons from irradiated metal foils in 1962. Otto first published on surface plasmon-polaritons in 1968.[6] Room-temperature polaritons were observed[7] in 2016 by Giovanni Lerario et al., at CNR NANOTEC Institute of Nanotechnology, using an organic microcavity supporting stable Frenkel exciton-polaritons at room temperature.
Types
A polariton is the result of the mixing of a photon with a polar excitation of a material. The following are types of polaritons:
- Phonon polaritons result from coupling of an infrared photon with an optic phonon;
- Exciton polaritons result from coupling of visible light with an exciton;
- Intersubband polaritons result from coupling of an infrared or terahertz photon with an intersubband excitation;
- Surface plasmon polaritons result from coupling of surface plasmons with light (the wavelength depends on the substance and its geometry);
- Bragg polaritons ("Braggoritons") result from coupling of Bragg photon modes with bulk excitons.[8]
- Plexcitons result from coupling plasmons with excitons.[9]
See also
References
- ↑ "Polariton". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2016-01-21.
- 1 2 Tolpygo, K.B. (1950). "Physical properties of a rock salt lattice made up of deformable ions". Zhurnal Eksperimentalnoi i Teoreticheskoi Fiziki (J. Exp. Theor. Phys.). 20 (6): 497–509, in Russian.
- 1 2 K.B. Tolpygo, "Physical properties of a rock salt lattice made up of deformable ions," Zh. Eks.Teor. Fiz. vol. 20, No. 6, pp. 497–509 (1950), English translation: Ukrainian Journal of Physics, vol. 53, special issue (2008); http://ujp.bitp.kiev.ua/files/journals/53/si/53SI21p.pdf
- ↑ Huang, Kun (1951). "Lattice vibrations and optical waves in ionic crystals". Nature. 167: 779–780. Bibcode:1951Natur.167..779H. doi:10.1038/167779b0.
- ↑ Huang, Kun (1951). "On the interaction between the radiation field and ionic crystals". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. A. 208: 352–365.
- ↑ Otto, A. (1968). "Excitation of nonradiative surface plasma waves in silver by the method of frustrated total reflection". Z. Phys. 216: 398–410. Bibcode:1968ZPhy..216..398O. doi:10.1007/BF01391532.
- ↑ Lerario, Giovanni; Fieramosca, Antonio; Barachati, Fábio; Ballarini, Dario; Daskalakis, Konstantinos S.; Dominici, Lorenzo; De Giorgi, Milena; Maier, Stefan A.; Gigli, Giuseppe; Kéna-Cohen, Stéphane; Sanvitto, Daniele (2016). "Room-temperature superfluidity in a polariton condensate". Nature Physics. doi:10.1038/nphys4147.
- ↑ Eradat N., et al. (2002) Evidence for braggoriton excitations in opal photonic crystals infiltrated with highly polarizable dyes, Appl. Phys. Lett. 80: 3491.
- ↑ Yuen-Zhou, Joel; Saikin, Semion K.; Zhu, Tony; Onbasli, Mehmet C.; Ross, Caroline A.; Bulovic, Vladimir; Baldo, Marc A. (2016-06-09). "Plexciton Dirac points and topological modes". Nature Communications. 7. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 4906226 . PMID 27278258. doi:10.1038/ncomms11783.
Further reading
- Baker-Jarvis, J. (2012). "The Interaction of Radio-Frequency Fields With Dielectric Materials at Macroscopic to Mesoscopic Scales" (PDF). Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. National Institute of Science and Technology. 117: 1. doi:10.6028/jres.117.001.
- Fano, U. (1956). "Atomic Theory of Electromagnetic Interactions in Dense Materials". Physical Review. 103 (5): 1202–1218. Bibcode:1956PhRv..103.1202F. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.103.1202.
- Hopfield, J. J. (1958). "Theory of the Contribution of Excitons to the Complex Dielectric Constant of Crystals". Physical Review. 112 (5): 1555–1567. Bibcode:1958PhRv..112.1555H. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.112.1555.