Coherent acoustic excitation of cavity polaritons

The study of acoustic excitation of semiconductor based photonic structures is anemerging field with great potential for new types of photonic manipulation1. In this paperwe present results of using a surface acoustic wave (SAW) to modulate a microcavitywith embedded quantum-well (QW) active layer. In the strong-coupling regime the cavityand quantum-well excitonic resonance display new cavity-polariton eigenstates that arejoint electronic and photonic excitations of the system2. These new eigenstates havestrongly modified in-plane dispersion and due to their composite light-matter nature theyhave a fast and highly nonlinear optical response.Our sample consists of epitaxially grown GaAs/AlGaAs QWs located at the anti-node ofa high Q lambda cavity, which is resonant with the QW excitonic transition3. The SAWfield, which is excited by an interdigital transducer on the piezoelectric GaAs samplesurface, modulates the refractive index and displaces the material causing a harmonicmodulation of the PBG structure1. This periodic modulation of the cavity-exciton systemleads to in-plane mini-Brillouin zone (MBZ) formation. The very high vacuum-Rabisplitting of our sample enables us to clearly resolve for the first time the resulting bandfolding of the polariton modes. Furthermore, the phonon-polariton interaction results inthe opening of the degenerate modes at the zone edges. We make a simple model of theSAW field and find the gap opening to be in good agreement with the experiment at thezone center and edge.