Intersubband polaritons are light-matter excitations originating from the strong coupling between an intersubband quantum well electronic transition and a microcavity photon mode. In this paper, we study how the Coulomb electron-electron interaction and the Pauli saturation of the electronic transitions affect the physics of intersubband polaritons. We develop a microscopic many-body theory for the physics of such composite bosonic excitations in a microcavity-embedded two-dimensional electron gas. As a first application, we calculate the modification of the depolarization shift and the efficiency of intersubband polariton-polariton scattering processes, which is large enough to induce interesting nonlinear optical effects in the mid- and far-infrared.

• Received 27 November 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.87.235322