Janessa Slone - Final Presentation.pdf

Nanoscale Device Characterization advances as researchers begin to dive deeper into the theory side of polariton dynamics in a semiconductor microcavity. Multidimensional optical spectroscopy allows physicists to isolate subtle effects in light-matter interactions. It relies on exciting a sample with a series of ultrashort optical pulses and measuring the coherent emission as a function of the time delay between the pulses. Semiconductors have quasiparticles called excitons, or bound electron-hole pairs, that strongly interact with photons and each other (the latter through “many-body” interactions). In specially-designed nanostructures called microcavities, the interaction between excitons and an optical cavity mode is enhanced further and hybrid particles called exciton-polaritons are formed. Understanding the dynamics of this system is important for developing new optoelectronic devices, but many-body interactions between these polariton states have only recently begun to be studied. Here we develop a model of the nonlinear response of a gallium arsenide semiconductor nanostructure. In the polariton basis, 2D Feynman Diagrams were deconstructed into a set of expressions, leading to a simulation of a 2-quantum spectrum. The next step will be to add many-body interactions to this simulation and compare it to experimental spectra.