Photonic Crystal Architecture for Room Temperature Equilibrium Bose-Einstein Condensation of Exciton-Polaritons

We describe photonic crystal microcavities with very strong light-matter interaction to realize room-temperature, equilibrium, exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). This is achieved through a careful balance between strong light-trapping in a photonic band gap (PBG) and large exciton density enabled by a multiple quantum-well (QW) structure with moderate dielectric constant. This enables the formation of long-lived, dense 10~$μ$m - 1~cm scale cloud of exciton-polaritons with vacuum Rabi splitting (VRS) that is roughly 7\% of the bare exciton recombination energy. We introduce a woodpile photonic crystal made of Cd$_{0.6}$Mg$_{0.4}$Te with a 3D PBG of 9.2\% (gap to central frequency ratio) that strongly focuses a planar guided optical field on CdTe QWs in the cavity. For 3~nm QWs with 5~nm barrier width the exciton-photon coupling can be as large as $\hbar\Ome=$55~meV (i.e., vacuum Rabi splitting $2\hbar\Ome=$110~meV). The exciton recombination energy of 1.65~eV corresponds to an optical wavelength of 750~nm. For $N=$106 QWs embedded in the cavity the collective exciton-photon coupling per QW, $\hbar\Ome/\sqrt{N}=5.4$~meV, is much larger than state-of-the-art value of 3.3~meV, for CdTe Fabry-Pérot microcavity. The maximum BEC temperature is limited by the depth of the dispersion minimum for the lower polariton branch, over which the polariton has a small effective mass $\sim 10^{-5}m_0$ where $m_0$ is the electron mass in vacuum. By detuning the bare exciton recombination energy above the planar guided optical mode, a larger dispersion depth is achieved, enabling room-temperature BEC.

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