The exploitation of the strong light-matter coupling regime and exciton-polariton condensates has emerged as a compelling approach to introduce strong interactions and nonlinearities into numerous photonic applications. The use of colloidal semiconductor quantum dots with strong three-dimensional confinement as the active material in optical microcavities would be highly advantageous due to their versatile structural and compositional tunability and wet-chemical processability, as well as potentially enhanced, confinement-induced polaritonic interactions. Yet, to date, exciton-polariton condensation in a microcavity has neither been achieved with epitaxial nor with colloidal quantum dots. Here, we demonstrate room-temperature polariton condensation in a thin film of monodisperse, colloidal CsPbBr3 quantum dots, placed in a tunable optical resonator with a Gaussian-shaped deformation serving as wavelength-scale potential well for polaritons. The onset of polariton condensation under pulsed optical excitation is manifested in emission by its characteristic superlinear intensity dependence, reduced linewidth, blueshift, and extended temporal coherence.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60553-3

David Otto Tiede