Ultrafast Manipulation of a Strongly Coupled Light–Matter System by a Giant ac Stark Effect

Abstract

We demonstrate ultrafast control of a strongly coupled light–matter system via a giant ac Stark effect in a specially designed strongly coupled microcavity using ultrafast pump–probe spectroscopy. We observe polariton energy shifts larger than the Rabi energy, enabling the implementation of strong noninvasive potentials for robust and ultrafast polaritonic switches. A nonperturbative treatment has been utilized to correctly describe the underlying physics of the giant Stark shifts in our strongly coupled light–matter system and corresponds well to the experimental results. Our findings shed new light on nonperturbative interactions and pave the way for all-optical quantum technologies.

Valley-selective optical Stark effect of exciton-polaritons in a monolayer semiconductor

“…In this report, we are limited to a perturbative regime of the Stark shift due to our highly-detuned pump. By tuning the pump closer to the polariton energies, significantly larger Stark shifts can be expected in which the magnitude of the shift exceeds the Rabi splitting, and the system can no longer be described perturbatively 27 . When pumping near-resonance, many-body interactions between virtual excitons created by the driving field can also begin to dominate the observed Stark shifts, manifesting as an anomalous blue-shift when the pump is tuned slightly above resonance 34 .…”

“…While the optical Stark effects of excitons have been measured in a variety of semiconductors, optical Stark effects in excitonpolaritons have so far only been measured in GaAs quantum wells [24][25][26][27] . Even in GaAs quantum wells, polarization-selective optical Stark shifts of polaritons have not yet been demonstrated.…”

Optical imprinting of superlattices in two-dimensional materials

“…Moreover, by irradiating with frequencies comparable to the bare tunneling strength instead of the highfrequency regime considered here, higher-order terms become relevant [47] and, therefore, one can induce a wider class of structures. While we focus on the Dirac semimetal system in this paper, our scheme can also be applied to other 2D materials such as semiconductors [66]. Our approach can be combined with other methods, such as surface acoustic waves in a solid-state platform [67], for trapping, cooling, and controlling charged particles, and for simulation of quantum many-body systems.…”

The optical Stark shift to control the dark exciton occupation of a quantum dot in a tilted magnetic field

“…The optical Stark effect in QDs has been used in several ways: for ultrafast control of the exciton polarization [2], to reduce the fine-structure splitting between the exciton levels [3], to induce the Autler-Towns splitting and for spin switching in QDs doped with a single magnetic ion [4,5], to enable the preparation of Fock states in QD-cavity systems [6], to enhance and suppress the tunneling rate between double-QD structures [7], and to control the energetic landscape of a charged QD in a spin-selective manner [8]. In other systems, the Stark effect has been used in GaAs quantum wells already in 1986 [9,10], while recent applications of the Stark effect are used in the newly found 2D semiconductors [11] as well as for the ultrafast control of exciton-polariton systems [12].…”