We propose a novel physical mechanism for the creation of long-lived macroscopic exciton-photon qubits in semiconductor microcavities with embedded quantum wells in the strong coupling regime. The polariton qubit is a superposition of lower branch and upper branch exciton-polariton states. We argue that the coherence time of Rabi oscillations can be dramatically enhanced due to their stimulated pumping from a permanent thermal reservoir of polaritons. We discuss applications of such qubits for quantum information processing, cloning, and storage purposes.

We studied monatomic linear carbon chains stabilized by gold nanoparticles attached to their ends and deposited on a solid substrate. We observe spectral features of straight chains containing from 8 to 24 atoms. Low-temperature PL spectra reveal characteristic triplet fine structures that repeat themselves for carbon chains of different lengths. The triplet is invariably composed of a sharp intense peak accompanied by two broader satellites situated 15 and 40 meV below the main peak. We interpret these resonances as an edge-state neutral exciton and positively and negatively charged trions, respectively. The time-resolved PL shows that the radiative lifetime of the observed quasiparticles is about 1 ns, and it increases with the increase of the length of the chain. At high temperatures a nonradiative exciton decay channel appears due to the thermal hopping of carriers between parallel carbon chains. Excitons in carbon chains possess large oscillator strengths and extremely low inhomogeneous broadenings.

We propose a physical mechanism which enables permanent Rabi oscillations in driven-dissipative condensates of exciton-polaritons in semiconductor microcavities subjected to external magnetic fields. The method is based on stimulated scattering of excitons from the incoherent reservoir. We demonstrate that permanent non-decaying oscillations may appear due to the parity-time symmetry of the coupled exciton-photon system realized in a specific regime of pumping to the exciton state and depletion of the reservoir. At non-zero exciton-photon detuning, robust permanent Rabi oscillations occur with unequal amplitudes of exciton and photon components. Our predictions pave way to realization of integrated circuits based on exciton-polariton Rabi oscillators.

Recently, we have experimentally observed signatures of sharp exciton peaks in the photoluminescence spectra of bundles of monoatomic carbon chains stabilized by gold nanoparticles and deposited on a glass substrate [1]. Here, we estimate the characteristic energies of excitonic transitions in this complex quasi-one-dimensional nano-system with use of the variational method. We show that the characteristic energy scale for the experimentally observed excitonic fine structure is governed by the interplay between the hopping energy in a Van der Waals quasicrystal formed by parallel carbon chains, the neutral-charged exciton splitting and the positive-negative trion splitting. These three characteristic energies are an order of magnitude lower than the direct exciton binding energy.

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