Extreme polaritonic confinement in indirectly patterned hexagonal Boron Nitride

In the past few decades, physicists have been producing increasingly small (subwavelength) cavities in order to amplify light-matter interactions. However, the quality factor, and hence the lifetime of photons in the smallest nanocavities has been limited. In this talk I will demonstrate a different approach to polaritonic confinement, using 'hypercavities', in which polaritons can be confined to volumes 8 orders of magnitude smaller than the volume of a vacuum photon (λ^3), while still maintaining an appreciable quality factor (Q~100). These experiments break away from the conventional nanophotonics paradigm and pave the way to new and exotic quantum electrodynamics experiments. Furthermore, the hypercavity confinement mechanism involves surprisingly rich multimodal interactions and when hypercavities are chained together multimodal effects produce complex fractal bandstructures.