Close Encounters between Periodic Light and Periodic Arrays of Quantum Emitters
Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 103802 – Published 2 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/71nx-b83j
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.
