Ultrastrong Coupling of the Cyclotron Transition of a 2D Electron Gas to a THz Metamaterial

Quantum Hall Meets Metamaterial Controlling and tuning light-matter interaction is crucial for fundamental studies of cavity quantum electrodynamics and for applications in classical and quantum devices. Scalari et al. (p. 1323) describe a system comprising an array of metamaterial split-ring resonators and a series of two-dimensional electronic gases (2DEG) formed in GaAs quantum wells. In a magnetic field, the electrons in the 2DEG performed cyclotron orbits and formed Landau levels. Strong coupling was observed between photon and magnetic cyclotron modes, producing a tunable semiconductor system for studying the light-matter interaction of two-level systems. A system of terahertz resonators coupled to two-dimensional electron gases presents a tunable test bed for the study of two-level physics. Artificial cavity photon resonators with ultrastrong light-matter interactions are attracting interest both in semiconductor and superconducting systems because of the possibility of manipulating the cavity quantum electrodynamic ground state with controllable physical properties. We report here experiments showing ultrastrong light-matter coupling in a terahertz (THz) metamaterial where the cyclotron transition of a high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is coupled to the photonic modes of an array of electronic split-ring resonators. We observe a normalized coupling ratio, Ωωc=0.58, between the vacuum Rabi frequency, Ω, and the cyclotron frequency, ωc. Our system appears to be scalable in frequency and could be brought to the microwave spectral range with the potential of strongly controlling the magnetotransport properties of a high-mobility 2DEG.

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