Electrical Detection of Ultrastrong Coherent Interaction between Terahertz Fields and Electrons Using Quantum Point Contacts.

Light-matter interaction in the ultrastrong coupling regime is attracting considerable attention owing to its applications to coherent control of material properties by a vacuum fluctuation field. However, electrical access to such an ultrastrongly coupled system is very challenging. In this work, we have fabricated a gate-defined quantum point contact (QPC) near the gap of a terahertz (THz) split-ring resonator (SRR) fabricated on a GaAs two-dimensional (2D) electron system. By illuminating the system with external THz radiation, the QPC shows a photocurrent spectrum which exhibits significant anticrossing that arises from coupling between the cyclotron resonance of the 2D electrons and the SRR. The observed photocurrent signal can be explained by energy-selective transmission/reflection of the quantum Hall edge channels at the QPC. Furthermore, at the same gate voltage and magnetic field conditions under which the anticrossing signal was observed, the QPC exhibits anomalous conductance modulation even in the dark environment.