The interaction of quantum well excitons with evanescent EM waves and the spectroscopy of waveguide polaritons.

Abstract

A transfer matrix method has been used to calculate the dispersion relations of planar dielectric waveguides (WGs) containing quantum well (QW) excitons. It is found that WG polaritons are formed, whose dispersion displays the classic anti-crossing behaviour at the exciton resonance frequency. For a QW placed at the anti-node of the fundamental TE mode of the WG considered, the Rabi-splitting is calculated to be 6.55meV, with WG polaritons of lifetime ~ 7 ps, corresponding to a displacement along the WG axis of ~ 0.5 mm. A smaller splitting of the polariton modes (4.7 meV) was found for the case of the QW placed in the cladding of the WG.