2D Materials: A New Platform to Realize “Quantum Light-Matter”

Atomically thin materials, such as graphene and transitional metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), have recently come to the forefront of research in materials physics. This is largely due to the ease with which they can be combined into artificially engineered heterostructures that exhibit emergent electronic and optical properties. Enhanced Coulomb interactions in the truly 2D limit makes TMDs, such as MoSe₂/WSe₂, promising to explore correlated quantum phases of matter. Moreover, the same interactions also lead to very strong light-matter couplings, resulting in rich exciton physics and half-light, half-matter polaritonic states. Finally, the presence of non-trivial geometry and topology in electronic and optical states of these materials is an additional ingredient to realize coupled phases of quantum light and matter – quantum light-matter – that are not only interesting from a fundamental perspective but can also have applications in quantum information processing applications.

In this talk, I will begin by highlighting some unique properties of optical excitations in TMDs which result from the chiral nature of constituent single-particle electronic states. The confinement of these optical excitations in TMD heterostructures results in quantum emitters whose emission energy can be tuned. Moreover, few-body and many-body dipolar interactions amongst them is promising for realizing on-demand quantum matter in a driven-dissipative setting.

Host: Xiao-XIao Zhang