Applied Physics Seminar

Microcavity exciton-polaritons are hybrid quantum quasi-particles as an admixture of cavity photons and quantum well excitons. The inherent light-matter duality provides experimental advantages to form coherent condensates at high temperatures (e.g. 4 K in GaAs and room temperature in GaN materials) and to access the dynamics of exciton-polaritons. I present engineered exciton-polariton-lattice systems, where we seek the beauty of non-zero momentum boson order arising from the intrinsic open-dissipative nature of the condensate as well as the topology of lattices. I envision that the polariton-lattice systems will be an intellectual interface, where we may address wondrous quantum many-body problems in the light-matter domain. And I briefly show our recent progress of electrically pumped exciton-polariton condensates for compact coherent matter waves operating at low threshold powers.

More about the speaker: Na Young Kim is a Physical Science Research Associate in Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto group at E. L. Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Stanford University for her dissertation on Correlated Electron Transport in One-dimensional Mesoscopic Conductors. She also holds B.S. degree in Physics from Seoul National University. She was a specially appointed researcher at the University of Tokyo and a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. She is a recipient of Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2012 from the Association of Korean Physicists in America. Her current research interests are to establish solid-state quantum emulators for studying macroscopic quantum phases and to develop novel optoelectronic devices based on exciton-polariton condensates.