Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Physics

Advisor

Vinod Menon

Committee Members

Pouyan Ghaemi

Swapan K Gayen

Li Ge

Yi-Hsien Lee

Subject Categories

Condensed Matter Physics | Optics

Keywords

Microcavity, Metamaterial, Polaritons, TMDs

Abstract

In this thesis we discuss the control of light matter interaction in low dimensional nanostructure cavity light confining structures. These structures have controllable dispersion properties through design which can be exploited to modify the interaction of light and matter. We will discuss two different types of light confining microcavities: a dielectric cavity and a metal cavity. The specific design of the cavity gives rise to the confinement of the electric field in the center where the nano-materials are placed. In this work, the main material was on the new class of two- dimensional semiconductors of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Due to the large binding energy and strong oscillator strength, in TMDs the strong coupling could be observed at room temperature. Specifically the valley polarization as an extra degree of freedom of the polaritons was demonstrated in the thesis. The realization of valley polaritons in two-dimensional semiconductor microcavities presents the first step towards engineering valley-polaritonic devices.

In the later of the thesis, we will also discuss the enhancement of the spontaneous emission of quantum emitters at optical frequencies by utilizing artificially designed photonic hypercrystal (PHC) and hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM). Here the large photon density of states (PDOS) in the hyperbolic media was exploited.The ability to significantly enhance the spontaneous emission rate and control the directionality give rise to the possibility of realizing the practical applications such as ultrafast light emitting diodes, sub-wavelength lasers and high resolution imaging.

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