We demonstrate the strong coupling of direct transition excitons in tungsten disulfide (WS2) with collective plasmonic resonances at room temperature. We use open plasmonic cavities formed by periodic arrays of metallic nanoparticles. We show clear anticrossings with monolayer, bilayer and thicker multilayer WS2 on top of the nanoparticle array.The Rabi energy of such hybrid system varies from 50 to 110 meV from monolayer to sixteen layers, while it does not scale with the square root of the number of layers as expected for collective strong coupling. We prove that out-of-plane coupling components can be disregarded since the normal field is screened due to the high refractive index contrast of the dielectric layers. Even though the in-plane dipole moments of the excitons decrease beyond monolayers, the strong in-plane field distributed in the flake can still enhance the coupling strength with multilayers. However, the screened out-of-plane field leads to the saturation of the Rabi energy.The achieved coherent coupling of TMD multilayers with open cavities could be exploited for

We investigate the interaction of light in gain-enhanced multilayered hyperbolic metamaterials in the strong interaction regime. Pumping the dye in the dielectric layers from inside the light cone, while emission occurs into the lower hyperbolic band outside the light cone, eases the problem of light incoupling. In the strong coupling regime both emission and absorption lines cause a distortion of the plasmonic modes due to Rabi splitting and a PT-symmetry broken phase, with generation of exceptional points at loss-gain compensation frequencies. We derive a semi-classical model that describes these phenomena for finite and infinite devices in detail, requiring only the overlap factor and the complex frequencies of the dye transition and the optical mode.

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The properties of graphene in terms of transparency and conductivity make it an ideal candidate to replace indium tin oxide (ITO) in a transparent conducting electrode. However, graphene is not always as good as ITO for some applications, due to a non-negligible absorption. For amorphous silicon photovoltaics, we have identified a useful case with a graphene-silica front electrode that improves upon ITO. For both electrode technologies, we simulate the weighted absorption in the active layer of planar amorphous silicon-based solar cells with a silver back-reflector. The graphene device shows a significantly increased absorbance compared to ITO-based cells for a large range of silicon thicknesses (34.4% versus 30.9% for a 300 nm thick silicon layer), and this result persists over a wide range of incidence angles.