Room-temperature vacuum Rabi splitting with active control in two-dimensional atomic crystals

Strong light-matter coupling manifested by vacuum Rabi splitting has attracted tremendous attention due to its fundamental importance in cavity quantum-electrodynamics research and great potentials in quantum information applications. A prerequisite for practical applications of the strong coupling in future quantum information processing and coherent manipulation is an all-solid-state system exhibiting room-temperature vacuum Rabi splitting with active control. Here we realized such a system in heterostructure consisting of monolayer WS2 and an individual plasmonic gold nanorod. By taking advantage of both of the small mode volume of the nanorod and large binding energy of the WS2 exciton, giant vacuum Rabi splitting energies of 91 meV ~ 133 meV can be obtained at ambient conditions, which only involve 5 ~ 18 excitons. The vacuum Rabi splitting can be dynamically tuned either by electrostatic gating or temperature scanning. These findings could pave the way towards active quantum optic devices operating at room temperature.