Electrically tunable artificial gauge potential for polaritons

Neutral particles subject to artificial gauge potentials can behave as charged particles in magnetic fields. This fascinating premise has led to demonstrations of one-way waveguides, topologically protected edge states and Landau levels for photons. In ultracold neutral atoms, effective gauge fields...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNature communications Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 14540 - 6
Main Authors Lim, Hyang-Tag, Togan, Emre, Kroner, Martin, Miguel-Sanchez, Javier, Imamoğlu, Atac
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 23.02.2017
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio
Subjects
140/125
639/624/400/2797
639/766/1130/2799
Atoms & subatomic particles
Charged particles
Energy
Humanities and Social Sciences
Magnetic fields
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary:Neutral particles subject to artificial gauge potentials can behave as charged particles in magnetic fields. This fascinating premise has led to demonstrations of one-way waveguides, topologically protected edge states and Landau levels for photons. In ultracold neutral atoms, effective gauge fields have allowed the emulation of matter under strong magnetic fields leading to realization of Harper-Hofstadter and Haldane models. Here we show that application of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields effects a tunable artificial gauge potential for two-dimensional microcavity exciton polaritons. For verification, we perform interferometric measurements of the associated phase accumulated during coherent polariton transport. Since the gauge potential originates from the magnetoelectric Stark effect, it can be realized for photons strongly coupled to excitations in any polarizable medium. Together with strong polariton–polariton interactions and engineered polariton lattices, artificial gauge fields could play a key role in investigation of non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly correlated photons. Artificial gauge fields promise a route to controlling topological properties of photonic systems but have only been realized by static design. Here, Lim et al . demonstrate that perpendicular electric and magnetic fields can effect dynamically controlled artificial gauge potentials for polaritons.
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These authors contributed equally to this work
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/ncomms14540