Which quasi-particles in wide band gap bulk microcavities ?
Résumé
We present numerical simulations of angle-resolved reflectivity of bulk ZnO microcavities with SiN/SiO2 distributed Bragg reflectors. The goal of these studies is to determine the conditions for observation of strong exciton-photon coupling at room temperature in such systems, which has been reported very recently. Indeed ZnO microcavities present a very specific hierarchy of interactions compared to GaAs or II-VI microcavities : the awaited Rabi splitting is larger than the Rydberg energy for excitons, which is larger than the splitting between the A,B,C valence bands. In our model the coupling of both fundamental and excited states of the optically active free excitons (XA, XB, XC) with the cavity mode is taken into account. The specific values of oscillator strength and excitonic binding energy in ZnO require that we include the above band gap absorption continuum. We do so by using Elliott's model of the dielectric function. We neglect disorder and inhomogeneous broadening in our calculations. The reflectivity spectra of the microcavity is calculated by a transfer matrix model, where either the ZnO thickness or the angle is varied in order to calculate the dispersion of the polaritonic branches. Those are compared to the dispersions obtained from a quasi-particle model which includes the excitonic continuum. The expansion coefficients of the polaritonic modes upon the photon-exciton basis are determined, as well as their coherence time. We show that the lower polariton branch is a well-defined and well-mixed exciton-photon state for low angles and/or negative detunings. The energy splitting induced by the strong oscillator strength in ZnO can be larger than the exciton binding energy, thus pushing the upper polariton branch into the absorption continuum and leading to a large intrinsic broadening. Therefore experimental evidence of strong coupling regime in bulk ZnO microcavities and its interpretation are difficult. Finally, as a criterion of strength of the strong coupling, we compute the ratio of the splitting between polariton branches to the polaritonic mode homogeneous broadening, for different detunings.