Cavity QED or the art of controlling the light matter interaction has applications in lasing, nonlinear optics or quantum information processing to say some. Besides, cavities and atoms allow for beautiful and fundamental experiments. Some years ago solid state physics began to imitate the optical layouts. Depending on the implementation cavities were replaced by photonic crystals, transmission lines, atom ensembles or nanoresonators, while atoms where mainly replaced by their artificial counterparts as quantum dots or superconducting qubits. The field of cavity QED on the solid state has attract interest of many labs making its progress quite impressive in the last years. After the first seminal experiments showing the strong coupling regime between (artificial) atom and cavity new ideas and experiments appear: Wigner reconstruction, coupled cavity architectures, quantumclassical limits, etc… Further, the possibility of these systems to reach the so called ultra strong coupling limit has been also demonstrated. In this limit the light-matter coupling is of the same order than the atom/cavity transition frequency. As a consequence the usual first order exchange transitions between the atom and cavity are not sufficient and non perturbative transitions emerge. In this talk I will overview the different regimes of light matter regimes in solid state devices. I will discuss several architectures in which we are working, and I will motivate this research by proposing them as good candidates for studying many body physics, such as quantum phase transitions.

Resumen del trabajo presentado a la VII Reunión Grupo Especializado de Física de Estado Sólido celebrado en Sevilla (España) del 25 al 27 de enero de 2012.

Peer reviewed