Electrically tunable quantum confinement of neutral excitons

Abstract: Confining particles to distances below their de Broglie wavelength discretizes their motional state. This fundamental effect is observed in many physical systems, ranging from electrons confined in atoms or quantum dots to ultracold atoms trapped in optical tweezers. In solid-state photonics, a long-standing goal has been to achieve fully tunable quantum confinement of optically active electron-hole pairs known as excitons. To confine excitons, existing approaches mainly rely on material modulation, which suffers from poor control over the energy and position of trapping potentials. This has severely impeded the engineering of large-scale quantum photonic systems. In this doctoral thesis, we demonstrate electrically controlled quantum confinement of neutral excitons in two-dimensional semiconductors. By combining gate-defined in-plane electric fields with inherent interactions between excitons and free charges in a lateral p-i-n junction, we achieve tunable exciton confinement lengths reaching values below 10 nm. Quantization of excitonic motion manifests in the measured optical response as a ladder of discrete voltage-dependent states below the continuum. Moreover, we observe that our confining potentials lead to a strong modification of the relative wave function of excitons. We further highlight the versatility of our approach by extending our confinement scheme to create quantum-dot-like zero-dimensional structures with a fully tunable confinement length. Our technique provides an experimental route towards achieving polariton blockade and creating scalable arrays of identical single-photon sources, which has wide-ranging implications for realizing strongly correlated photonic phases and on-chip optical quantum information processors.