Strong light–matter interaction in ZnO microcavities

The strong light–matter interaction in ZnO-embedded microcavities has received great attention in recent years, due to its ability to generate the robust bosonic quasiparticles, exciton-polaritons, at or above room temperature. This review introduces the strong coupling effect in ZnO-based microcavities and describes the recent progress in this field. In addition, the report contains a systematic analysis of the room-temperature strong-coupling effects from relaxation to polariton lasing. The stable room temperature operation of polaritonic effects in a ZnO microcavity promises a wide range of practical applications in the future, such as ultra-low power consumption coherent light emitters in the ultraviolet region, polaritonic transport, and other fundamental of quantum optics in solid-state systems. This Review discusses phenomena arising from the strong coupling between light and matter inside zinc oxide microcavities. Ying-Yu Lai and colleagues from National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu describe the ability for such structures to support polariton effects at room temperature, owing to the large oscillator strength and exciton binding energy of zinc oxide. In particular, they discuss the substantial progress that has been made in achieving polariton lasing at temperatures as high as 353 K. They also describe methods for fabricating such microcavities, together with the polariton relaxation and bottleneck processes that can occur. The authors suggest that further improvements in the cavities should be possible by improving the epitaxial quality of the zinc oxide layer and surrounding distributed Bragg reflectors, which are used to confine the light.

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