We demonstrate the spatial confinement of electronic excitations in a solid state system, within novel artificial structures that can be designed having arbitrary dimensionality and shape. The excitations under study are exciton-polaritons in a planar semiconductor microcavity. They are confined within a micron-sized region through lateral trapping of their photon component. Striking signatures of confined states of lower and upper polaritons are found in angle-resolved light emission spectra, where a discrete energy spectrum and broad angular patterns are present. A theoretical model supports unambiguously our observations.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0602640,
title = {Engineering the spatial confinement of exciton-polaritons in semiconductors},
author = {Reda Idrissi Kaitouni and Ounsi El Daif and Maxime Richard and Pierre Lugan and Augustin Baas and Thierry Guillet and François Morier-Genoud and Jean-Daniel Ganière and Jean-Louis Staehli and Vincenzo Savona and Benoît Deveaud},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0602640},
year = {2009}
}