Speaker
Description
Polaritons exhibit delocalized wavefunctions resulting in enhanced energy transport compared to bare polar excitations. We developed a general method based on ultrafast far-field microscopy to directly image the transport of phonon-polaritons and exciton-polaritons from mid-IR to visible frequencies in a variety of environments, including microcavities, self-hybridized material slabs, two-dimensional materials, and plasmonic films, with femtosecond resolution and few-nanometer sensitivity to spatial motion. We leverage this approach to image polaritons over a wide temperature range, allowing us to systematically test the effect of both static and dynamic disorder on polariton transport and localization dynamics. I will discuss a few ways in which these results are allowing us to guide the optimization of polaritonic systems towards enhanced energy harvesting, single-photon gates and chemical selectivity.
