Magneto-optics in a van der Waals magnet tuned by self-hybridized polaritons

Florian Dirnberger; Jiamin Quan; Rezlind Bushati; Geoffrey M Diederich; Matthias Florian; Julian Klein; Kseniia Mosina; Zdenek Sofer; Xiaodong Xu; Akashdeep Kamra; Francisco J García-Vidal; Andrea Alù; Vinod M Menon

doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06275-2

Magneto-optics in a van der Waals magnet tuned by self-hybridized polaritons

Nature. 2023 Aug;620(7974):533-537. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06275-2. Epub 2023 Aug 16.

Authors

Florian Dirnberger^#¹, Jiamin Quan^#^{2

3

4}, Rezlind Bushati^{5

2}, Geoffrey M Diederich^{6

7}, Matthias Florian⁸, Julian Klein⁹, Kseniia Mosina¹⁰, Zdenek Sofer¹⁰, Xiaodong Xu⁷, Akashdeep Kamra¹¹, Francisco J García-Vidal¹¹, Andrea Alù^{12

13

14}, Vinod M Menon^{15

16}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, City College of New York, New York, NY, USA. fdirnberger@ccny.cuny.edu.
² Department of Physics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
³ Photonics Initiative, CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, New York, NY, USA.
⁴ Department of Electrical Engineering, City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
⁵ Department of Physics, City College of New York, New York, NY, USA.
⁶ Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
⁸ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, USA.
⁹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, Prague, Czech Republic.
¹¹ Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia Condensada and Condensed Matter Physics Center, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
¹² Department of Physics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA. aalu@gc.cuny.edu.
¹³ Photonics Initiative, CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, New York, NY, USA. aalu@gc.cuny.edu.
¹⁴ Department of Electrical Engineering, City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, USA. aalu@gc.cuny.edu.
¹⁵ Department of Physics, City College of New York, New York, NY, USA. vmenon@ccny.cuny.edu.
¹⁶ Department of Physics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA. vmenon@ccny.cuny.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 37587298
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06275-2

Abstract

Controlling quantum materials with light is of fundamental and technological importance. By utilizing the strong coupling of light and matter in optical cavities^1-3, recent studies were able to modify some of their most defining features^4-6. Here we study the magneto-optical properties of a van der Waals magnet that supports strong coupling of photons and excitons even in the absence of external cavity mirrors. In this material-the layered magnetic semiconductor CrSBr-emergent light-matter hybrids called polaritons are shown to substantially increase the spectral bandwidth of correlations between the magnetic, electronic and optical properties, enabling largely tunable optical responses to applied magnetic fields and magnons. Our results highlight the importance of exciton-photon self-hybridization in van der Waals magnets and motivate novel directions for the manipulation of quantum material properties by strong light-matter coupling.