Plasmon-induced thermal tuning of few-exciton strong coupling in 2D atomic crystals

Strong light-matter interaction in 2D materials at the few-exciton level is important for both fundamental studies and quantum optical applications. Characterized by a fast coherent energy exchange between photons and excitons, strongly coupled plasmon-exciton systems in 2D materials have been reported with large Rabi splitting. However, large Rabi splitting at the few-exciton level generally requires large optical fields in a highly confined mode volume, which are difficult to achieve for in-plane excitons in 2D materials. In this work, we present a study of a strongly coupled gold dimer antenna with a sub-10 nm gap on a monolayer tungsten disulphide (WS2), with an estimated number of excitons of 4.67 +/- 0.99. We demonstrate that varying the spatial mode overlap between the plasmonic field and the 2D material can result in up to a similar to tenfold increase in the number of excitons, a value that can be further actively tuned via plasmon-induced heating effects. The demonstrated results would represent a key step toward quantum optical applications operating at room temperatures. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement.