Abstract

In recent years much interest has been devoted to the investigation of quantum effects that have no classical analogs. Antibunching, non-poissonian statistics of photons, and squeezed states of the electromagnetic field are the most common ones. These new effects found in optics have a certain generality; they have analogs in the physics of condensed media. Condensed matter in particular exhibits a variety of bosons (phonons, excitons, etc.) that, via the interaction with an external field, exhibit some non-classical features in much the same way as photons. Within the framework of the Hopfield polariton model, the polar phonon polarization of a crystal when coupled to the electromagnetic field to form a phonon-polariton is such an instance, and likewise for the exciton-polariton. We specifically investigate the quantum structure of a polariton state to demonstrate the existence of non-classical effects associated with it.

© 1992 IQEC