Cavity polaritons from excited-subband transitions

We report on the coupling of optical transitions between excited conduction subbands in GaAs∕AlGaAs heterostructures with the resonant photonic mode of a semiconductor microcavity. The coupling is found to increase with temperature, owing to the thermal excitation of carriers from the ground subband and, thanks to the large dipole-matrix element of the excited-state transition, a record splitting of 60meV is shown in the room-temperature reflectance. The importance of translating the angle-dependent spectra into energy-wavevector dispersion when the coupling is so large is highlighted, and a theoretical fitting procedure is used to extract the value of the vacuum-field Rabi energy.