Ultrastrong coupling with few (<60) electrons at 280 GHz in single LC nanogap resonators (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Strong light-matter coupling lies at the heart of quantum optics and recently has been successfully explored also in the GHz and THz range. New, intriguing quantum optical phenomena have been predicted in the ultrastrong coupling regime, when the coupling strength Omega becomes comparable to the unperturbed frequency of the system omega_c. We recently proposed a new experimental platform where the physics of the ultrastrong coupling can be investigated at GHz-THz frequencies. We couple the inter-Landau level transition of an high-mobility 2 dimensional electron gas (2DEG) to the subwavelength photonic mode of an LC meta-atom. Our system benefits from the collective enhancement of the light-matter coupling which comes from the scaling of the coupling constant Omega with the square root of the number of electrons in the last Landau level. In our previous experiments and in literature this number varies from 10000-1000 electrons per resonator. Here we present ultrastrong coupling between a high-mobility 2DEG (mu=2.3X 10^6 cm^2/Vs) and an extremely subwavelength hybrid-LC resonator ensemble (11 resonators) with an highly reduced effective mode volume V_eff=4 x 10^-19 m^3=4 x 10^(-10) lambda^3 at a frequency of 300 GHz. The number of optically active electrons is given by the flux quantum multiplied by the effective resonator area and is proportional to the magnetic field. At the anticrossing field of B=0.73 T we measure less than 80 electrons ultrastrongly coupled to the resonator with a normalized coupling ratio Omega/omega_c=0.35. This experiment paves the way towards the study of ultrastrong coupling physics in the regime of quantum non-linearities.