Ultrastrong coupling of intersubband plasmons and terahertz metamaterials

We report on the ultrastrong-coupling between localized plasmons of a planar terahertz metamaterial and intersubband plasmons in a modulation doped quantum well sample. Such a system exhibits the formation of a lower and an upper polariton branch when the metamaterial eigenfrequency is tuned close to resonance with the intersubband transition. We achieve a normalized polariton splitting of 22% and a polaritonic gap of 2.4% of the intersubband transition frequency. In addition to the usual geometrical scaling, we demonstrate the effective tuning of the metamaterial resonance by dry etching with a tuning range of more than 1 THz.