Room temperature Bloch surface wave polaritons

Polaritons are hybrid light-matter quasi-particles that have gathered a significant attention for their capability of showing room temperature and out-of-equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation. More recently, a novel class of ultrafast optical devices have been realized by using flows of polariton fluids, such as switches, interferometers, and logical gates. However, polariton lifetimes and propagation distances are strongly limited by photon losses and accessible in-plane momenta in normal microcavity samples. In this work, we show experimental evidence of the formation of room temperature propagating polariton states arising from the strong coupling between organic excitons and a Bloch surface wave. This result, which was only recently predicted, paves the way for the realization of polariton devices that could allow lossless propagation up to macroscopic distances.