Experimental verification of the very strong coupling regime in a GaAs quantum well microcavity

The dipole coupling strength g between cavity photons and quantum well excitons determines the regime of light matter coupling in quantum well-microcavities. In the strong coupling regime, a reversible energy between exciton and cavity photon takes place, which leads to the formation of hybrid polaritonic resonances. If the coupling is further increased, a hybridization of different single exciton states emerges, which is referred to as the very strong coupling regime. In semiconductor quantum wells such a regime is predicted to manifest as a photon-mediated electron-hole coupling leading to different excitonic wave functions for the two polaritonic branches when the ratio of the coupling strength to exciton binding energy gEB/ approaches unity. Here, we verify experimentally the existence of this regime in magneto-optical measurements on a microcavity characterized by gEB/≈0.64, showing that the average electron-hole separation of the upper polariton is significantly increased compared to the bare quantum well exciton Bohr radius. This yields a diamagnetic shift around zero detuning that exceeds the shift of the lower polariton by one order of magnitude and the bare quantum well exciton diamagnetic shift by a factor of two. The lower polariton exhibits a diamagnetic shift smaller than expected from the coupling of a rigid exciton to the cavity mode which suggests more tightly bound electron-hole pairs than in the bare quantum well.