Diffusive propagation of exciton-polaritons through thin crystal slabs

Abstract

If light beam propagates through matter containing point impurity centers, the amount of energy absorbed by the media is expected to be either independent of the impurity concentration N or proportional to N, corresponding to the intrinsic absorption or impurity absorption, respectively. Comparative studies of the resonant transmission of light in the vicinity of exciton resonances measured for 15 few-micron GaAs crystal slabs with different values of N, reveal a surprising tendency. While N spans almost five decimal orders of magnitude, the normalized spectrally-integrated absorption of light scales with the impurity concentration as N 1/6. We show analytically that this dependence is a signature of the diffusive mechanism of propagation of exciton-polaritons in a semiconductor.