Speaker
Description
In nanophotonic environments, light–matter interactions are typically shaped by multiple overlapping electromagnetic modes that interfere with one another, giving rise to sharp spectral features such as Fano profiles. Despite this complexity, polaritons are often described using simplified single-mode cavity QED models.
In this talk, I will show that these interference features can be understood as effective electromagnetic modes: interference-induced resonances, with inherently non-Hermitian couplings to quantum emitters. I will demonstrate that such modes can hybridize with emitters to form polaritons even outside the conventional strong-coupling regime.
This leads to qualitatively new behavior: the resulting polaritons acquire different decay rates, giving rise to what we term imaginary Rabi splitting. Extending this picture to many-emitter systems, I will show that these interference-induced resonances can generate long-lived polaritons that persist beyond excitonic dark states.
Finally, I will present numerical results for realistic nanophotonic platforms, illustrating the robustness of this regime to disorder and loss. These findings point to a new route for engineering polaritonic states in complex electromagnetic environments beyond the single-mode paradigm.