Close encounters between periodic light and periodic arrays of quantum emitters

Abstract

We introduce crystal polaritons, hybrid excitations formed when the collective excitations of a periodic quantum-emitter array strongly couple to the resonant Bloch modes of a metasurface. This realizes a cavity-QED platform in which periodic light and periodic matter are treated on the same footing, allowing strong collective light-matter coupling in an extended, lossy, and dispersive nanophotonic structure. To describe this regime, we develop a reciprocal-space few-mode quantization based on macroscopic quantum electrodynamics, which maps the metasurface resonances seen by the emitter array onto a cavity-QED Hamiltonian at each in-plane momentum. We show that both plasmonic surface-lattice resonances and dielectric bound states in the continuum can enter the strong-coupling regime with a single emitter per unit cell. As a consequence of the resonant nonlinearities of the resulting crystal polaritons, the platform enables quantum light generation with efficiencies orders of magnitude higher than those achieved in conventional nonlinear metasurfaces.