Abstract:

Since their discovery in 1992 by Weisbuch and others, exciton-polaritons have opened the world of semiconductor quantum optics.  An exciton-polariton is a quasiparticle formed as a superposition of a bound electron-hole state (exciton) and a photon.  Owing to the light effective mass of a microcavity photon, exciton-polaritons exhibit peculiar dispersion characteristics that have enabled a variety of applications.  Exciton-polaritons can interact via their exciton component and they have shown parametric scattering, polariton lasing, Bose condensation at temperatures of a few Kelvin and many of the effect associated with superfluid behavior.

In our group we study the use of polariton parametric scattering for the generation of entangled photon pairs.  To this end we have constructed a versatile experiment based on spatial light modulators, so that we can explore various momentum-conservation, i.e. phase-matching schemes.  I will present results on the parametric scattering of polaritons and ideas on how to suppress bacground scattering mechanisms for generating clean entanglement.

(PLEASE NOTE NON-STANDARD DATE)