Microscopic description of exciton-polaritons in microcavities

Abstract: We investigate the microscopic description of exciton-polaritons that involves electrons, holes and photons within a two-dimensional microcavity. We show that in order to recover the simplified exciton-photon model that is typically used to describe polaritons, one must correctly define the exciton-photon detuning and exciton-photon (Rabi) coupling in terms of the bare microscopic parameters. For the case of unscreened Coulomb interactions, we find that the exciton-photon detuning is strongly shifted from its bare value in a manner akin to renormalization in quantum electrodynamics. Within the renormalized theory, we exactly solve the problem of a single exciton-polariton for the first time and obtain the full spectral response of the microcavity. In particular, we find that the electron-hole wave function of the polariton can be significantly modified by the very strong Rabi couplings achieved in current experiments. Our microscopic approach furthermore allows us to obtain the effective interaction between identical polaritons for any light-matter coupling. Crucially, we show that the standard treatment of polariton-polariton interactions in the very strong coupling regime is incorrect, since it neglects the light-induced modification of the exciton size and thus greatly overestimates the effect of Pauli exclusion on the Rabi coupling, i.e., the saturation of exciton oscillator strength. Our findings thus provide the foundations for understanding and characterizing exciton-polariton systems across the whole range of polariton densities.