Polaritonic Tamm states induced by cavity photons

Abstract

We consider a periodic chain of oscillating dipoles, interacting via long-range dipole–dipole interactions, embedded inside a cuboid cavity waveguide. We show that the mixing between the dipolar excitations and cavity photons into polaritons can lead to the appearance of new states localized at the ends of the dipolar chain, which are reminiscent of Tamm surface states found in electronic systems. A crucial requirement for the formation of polaritonic Tamm states is that the cavity cross section is above a critical size. Above this threshold, the degree of localization of the Tamm states is highly dependent on the cavity size since their participation ratio scales linearly with the cavity cross-sectional area. Our findings may be important for quantum confinement effects in one-dimensional systems with strong light–matter coupling.