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Electromagnetically Induced Exciton Dynamics and Bose-Einstein Condensation near a Photonic Band Gap

We demonstrate electromagnetically-induced anomalous quantum dynamics of an exciton in a photonic band gap (PBG) - quantum well
(QW) hetero-structure. Within the engineered electromagnetic vacuum of the PBG material, the exciton can propagate through the QW by the emission and re-absorption of virtual photons in addition to the conventional electronic hopping mechanism. When the exciton wavevector and recombination energy coincide nearly with a photonic band edge, the exciton kinetic energy is lowered by 1-10meV through coherent radiative hopping. This capture of the exciton by the photonic band edge is accompanied by strong electromagnetic dressing in which the exciton's renormalized effective mass is 4-5 orders of magnitude smaller than in the absence of the PBG environment. This
dressed exciton exhibits a long radiative lifetime characteristic of a photon-atom bound state and is robust to phonon-assisted,
re-combinative decay. By inheriting properties of the PBG electromagnetic vacuum, the bound electron-hole pair becomes a stable, ultra-mobile quantum excitation.
Unlike traditional exciton-polariton modes created by placing a QW in a one-dimensional optical cavity, our PBG-QW excitons exhibit
strong coupling to optical modes and retain a long lifetime. This is crucial for unambiguous observation of quantum coherence effects such as Bose-Einstein condensation.

We present a model for the equilibrium quantum statistics of a condensate of repulsively interacting bosons in a two-dimensional trap. Particle correlations in the ground state are treated exactly,
whereas interactions with excited particles are treated in a generalized Bogoliubov mean-field theory. This leads to a fundamental physical picture for condensation of interacting bosons through an anharmonic oscillator ground state coupled to excited
Bogoliubov quasiparticles in which the quantum number statistics of condensate particles emerges self-consistently. Our anharmonic oscillator model for the exciton ground state manifold goes beyond the conceptual framework of traditional Bogoliubov theory. Below the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature, our model exhibits a crossover from particle bunching to Poissonian statistics and finally antibunching as temperature is lowered or as the trapping area is decreased. When applied to Bose condensation of long-lived dressed excitons in a photonic band gap material, our model suggests that this system may serve as a novel tunable source for
non-classical states of light.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32334
Date26 March 2012
CreatorsYang, Shengjun
ContributorsJohn, Sajeev
Source SetsUniversity of Toronto
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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