Microscopic modeling of exciton-polariton diffusion coefficients in atomically thin semiconductors

Journal article, 2022

In the strong light-matter coupling regime realized, e.g., by integrating semiconductors into optical microcavities, polaritons as new hybrid light-matter quasiparticles are formed. The corresponding change in the dispersion relation has a large impact on optics, dynamics, and transport behavior of semiconductors. In this paper, we investigate the strong-coupling regime in hBN-encapsulated MoSe2 monolayers focusing on exciton-polariton diffusion. Applying a microscopic approach based on the exciton density matrix formalism combined with the Hopfield approach, we predict a drastic increase of the diffusion coefficients by two to three orders of magnitude in the strong-coupling regime. We explain this behavior by the much larger polariton group velocity and suppressed polariton-phonon scattering channels with respect to the case of bare excitons. Our study contributes to a better microscopic understanding of polariton diffusion in atomically thin semiconductors.