Optical bound states in the continuum (BICs) provide a way to engineer very narrow resonances in photonic crystals. The extended interaction time in these systems is particularly promising for the enhancement of nonlinear optical processes and the development of the next generation of active optical devices. However, the achievable interaction strength is limited by the purely photonic character of optical BICs. Here, we mix the optical BIC in a photonic crystal slab with excitons in the atomically thin semiconductor MoSe₂ to form nonlinear exciton-polaritons with a Rabi splitting of 27 meV, exhibiting large interaction-induced spectral blueshifts. The asymptotic BIC-like suppression of polariton radiation into the far field toward the BIC wavevector, in combination with effective reduction of the excitonic disorder through motional narrowing, results in small polariton linewidths below 3 meV. Together with a strongly wavevector-dependent Q-factor, this provides for the enhancement and control of polariton–polariton interactions and the resulting nonlinear optical effects, paving the way toward tuneable BIC-based polaritonic devices for sensing, lasing, and nonlinear optics.

An ensemble of quantum dot excitons may be used for coherent information manipulation. Due to the ensemble inhomogeneity any optical information retrieval occurs in the form of a photon echo. We show that the inhomogeneity can lead to a significant deviation from the conventional echo timing sequence. Variation of the area of the initial rotation pulse, which generates excitons in a dot subensemble only, reveals this complex picture of photon echo formation. We observe a retarded echo for $\pi /2$ pulses, while for $3\pi /2$ the echo is advanced in time as evidenced through monitoring the Rabi oscillations in the time-resolved photon echo amplitude from (In,Ga)As/GaAs self-assembled quantum dot structures and confirmed by detailed calculations.

We report on the coherent optical response from an ensemble of (In,Ga)As quantum dots (QDs) embedded in a planar Tamm-plasmon microcavity with a quality factor of approximately 100. Significant enhancement of the light-matter interaction is demonstrated under selective laser excitation of those quantum dots which are in resonance with the cavity mode. The enhancement is manifested through Rabi oscillations of the photon echo, demonstrating coherent control of excitons with picosecond pulses at intensity levels more than an order of magnitude smaller as compared with bare quantum dots. The decay of the photon echo transients is weakly changed by the resonator, indicating a small decrease of the coherence time $T_2$ which we attribute to the interaction with the electron plasma in the metal layer located close (40 nm) to the QD layer. Simultaneously we see a reduction of the population lifetime $T_1$, inferred from the stimulated photon echo, due to an enhancement of the spontaneous emission by a factor of 2, which is attributed to the Purcell effect, while nonradiative processes are negligible, as confirmed from time-resolved photoluminescence.