Photon-photon polaritons in χ(2) microresonators

Abstract

We consider a high-Q microresonator with χ(2) nonlinearity under conditions when the coupling rate between the sidebands around the pump and its second harmonic exceeds the damping rates, implying the strong coupling regime (SC). Using the dressed-resonator approach we demonstrate that this regime leads to the dominance of the Hermitian part of the operator, driving the sideband dynamics over its non-Hermitian part responsible for the parametric gain. This has allowed us to introduce and apply the cross-area concept of the polariton quasiparticles and their effective masses in the context of χ(2) ring microresonators. We further use polaritons to predict the modified spectral response of the resonator to the weak probe field, and to reveal the splitting of the bare-resonator resonances, avoided crossings, and Rabi dynamics. Polariton basis also allows the deriving of a discrete sequence of the parametric thresholds for generation of sidebands of different orders.