We show how the transition between synchronized and desynchronized states of a spinor polariton condensate can be used to drive a transition between stationary vortex lattices and half-vortex lattices. This provides a way to control polariton spin textures by a combination of pump spot profile and applied magnetic fields. To do this, we extend the model of non-equilibrium spinor condensates to include relaxation, and study how this affects the desynchronization transition. We discuss how the pattern formation can be explained by behavior of the homogeneous system.
We show theoretically that an open-dissipative polariton condensate confined within a trapping potential and driven by an incoherent pumping scheme gives rise to bistability between odd and even modes of the potential. Switching from one state to the other can be controlled via incoherent pulsing which becomes an important step towards construction of low-powered opto-electronic devices. The origin of the effect comes from modulational instability between odd and even states of the trapping potential governed by the nonlinear polariton-polariton interactions.
We theoretically investigate a driven-dissipative model of strongly interacting photons in a nonlinear optical cavity in the presence of a synthetic magnetic field. We show the possibility of using a frequency-dependent incoherent pump to create a strongly-correlated $ν= 1/2$ bosonic Laughlin state of light: thanks to the incompressibility of the Laughlin state, fluctuations in the total particle number and excitation of edge modes can be tamed by imposing a suitable external potential profile for photons. We further propose angular momentum-selective spectroscopy of the emitted light as a too…
We develop a quantum field theory for parametrically pumped polaritons using Keldysh Green's function techniques. By considering the mean-field and Gaussian fluctuations, we find that the low energy physics of the highly non-equilibrium phase transition to the optical parametric oscillator regime is in many ways similar to equilibrium condensation. In particular, we show that this phase transition can be associated with an effective chemical potential, at which the system's bosonic distribution function diverges, and an effective temperature. As in equilibrium systems, the transition is achiev…
We investigate the stability and coherence properties of one-dimensional exciton-polariton condensates under nonresonant pumping. We model the condensate dynamics using the open-dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation. In the case of spatially homogeneous pumping, we find that the instability of the steady state leads to significant eduction of the coherence length. We consider two effects that can lead to the stabilization of the steady state, i.e. the polariton energy relaxation and the influence of an inhomogeneous pumping profile. We find that, while the former has little effect on the stabi…
Two-photon absorption (TPA) allows accessing dark states of matter otherwise inaccessible to light, which serve as important building blocks for quantum information processing. In a semiconductor microcavity, TPA driven condensation of strongly-coupled light-matter exciton-polaritons can enable new solid-state quantum simulations of dark state-condensate interactions, and was predicted to stimulate THz emission. Here, we report the first observation of two-photon pumped polariton condensation, demonstrated by angle-resolved photoluminescence in a GaAs-based microcavity. TPA is evidenced in the…
Self-rotation occurs in an exciton-polariton condensate in a two-dimensional semiconductor microcavity pumped by a nonresonant Gaussian laser beam. A wave packet of the condensate spontaneously rotates around the center of the pumped region at a constant frequency breaking the rotation symmetry of the system. When two self-rotating condensates are created with an appropriate distance, synchronization occurs between the dynamics of the self-rotating condensates.
We study nonresonantly pumped exciton-polariton system in the vicinity of the dynamical instability threshold. We find that the system exhibits unique and rich dynamics, which leads to spatiotemporal pattern formation. The patterns have a tree-like structure and are reminiscent of structures that appear in a variety of soft matter systems. Within the approximation of slow and fast time scales, we show that the polariton model exhibits self-replication point in analogy to reaction-diffusion systems.
We investigate the process of coarsening via annihilation of vortex-antivortex pairs, following the quench to the condensate phase in a nonresonantly pumped polariton system. We find that the late-time dynamics is an example of universal phase ordering kinetics, characterized by scaling of correlation functions in time. Depending on the parameters of the system, the evolution of the characteristic length scale L(t) can be the same as for the two-dimensional XY model, described by a power law with the dynamical exponent z \aprox 2 and a logarithmic correction, or z \aprox 1 which agrees with pr…
We study theoretically the emission of dark solitons induced by a moving defect in a nonresonantly pumped exciton-polariton condensate. The number of created dark solitons per unit of time is found to be strongly dependent on the pump power. We relate the observed dynamics of this process to the oscillations of the drag force experienced by the condensate. We investigate the stability of the polariton quantum fluid and present various types of dynamics depending on the condensate and moving obstacle parameters. Furthermore, we provide analytical expressions for dark soliton dynamics using the …
We study the phase-ordering of parametrically and incoherently driven microcavity polaritons after an infinitely rapid quench across the critical region. We confirm that the system, despite its driven-dissipative nature, fulfils dynamical scaling hypothesis for both driving schemes by exhibiting self-similar patterns for the two-point correlator at late times of the phase ordering. We show that polaritons are characterised by the dynamical critical exponent z ~ 2 with topological defects playing a fundamental role in the dynamics, giving logarithmic corrections both to the power-law decay of t…
We provide an analytical and numerical description of relaxation oscillations in the nonresonantly pumped polariton condensate. The presented considerations are based on the open dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation coupled to a pair of rate equations. The evolution of the condensate density can be explained qualitatively by studying the topology of the trajectory in phase space. We use a fixed points analysis for the classification of the different regimes of condensate dynamics, including fast stabilization, slow oscillations and ultrashort pulse emission. We obtain an analytical condition …
Mass-anisotropy driven stripe pattern formation and directional modulational instability in polariton condensate
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur(印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校);Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar(印度理工学院甘地纳加尔分校);Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems(马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所);Department of Physics, Virginia Tech(弗吉尼亚理工大学物理系)
The family of one-dimensional localized solutions to dissipative nonlinear equations includes a variety of objects such as sources, sinks, shocks (kinks), and pulses. These states are in general accompanied by nontrivial density currents, which are not necessarily related to the movement of the object itself. We investigate the existence and physical properties of sink-type solutions in nonresonantly pumped exciton-polariton condensates modeled by an open-dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation. While sinks possess density profiles similar to bright solitons, they are qualitatively different obj…
We study the relation between the models commonly used to describe the dynamics of nonresonantly pumped exciton-polariton condensates, namely the ones described by the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, and by the open-dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation including a separate equation for the reservoir density. In particular, we focus on the validity of the adiabatic approximation that allows to reduce the coupled condensate-reservoir dynamics to a single partial differential equation. We find that the adiabatic approximation consists of three independent analytical conditions that have to be …
Exciton-polariton condensate in semiconductor microcavities constitute a novel kind of non-equilibrium superfluid. In a recent experiment [P. Stepanov, {\it et. al.,} Nat. Commun. {\bf 10}, 1038 (2019)], the dispersion relation of collective excitations in a polariton condensate under the resonant pumping has been investigated with the emphasis on the role of reservoir of long-lived excitons in determining the superfluidity. Inspired by such an experimental advance, we study the superfluidity of a exciton-polaritonn condensate under non-resonant pumping by calculating the drag force exerted on…
Exciton-polaritons in an optical microcavity can form a macroscopically coherent state despite being an inherently driven-dissipative system. In comparison with equilibrium bosonic fluids, polaritonic condensates possess multiple peculiarities that make them behave differently from well-known textbook examples. One such peculiarity is the presence of dark excitons which are created by the pump together with optically-active particles. They can considerably affect the spectrum of elementary excitations of the condensate and hence change its superfluid properties. Here, we theoretically analyze …
The dark solitons observed in a large variety of nonlinear media are unstable against the modulational (snake) instabilities and can break in vortex streets. This behavior has been investigated in nonlinear optical crystals and ultracold atomic gases. However, a deep characterization of this phenomenon is still missing. In a resonantly pumped 2D polariton superfluid, we use an all-optical imprinting technique together with the bistability of the polariton system to create dark solitons in confined channels. Due to the snake instabilities, the solitons are unstable and break in arrays of vortex…
The spontaneous formation of lattice structure of quantized vortices is a characteristic feature of superfluidity in closed systems under thermal equilibrium. In exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a typical example of macroscopic quantum state in open systems, spontaneous vortex lattices have also been proposed by not yet observed. Here, we take into account the finite decay rate of exciton reservoir, and theoretically investigate the vortex structures in circularly pumped polariton Bose-Einstein condensate. Our results show that a decreasing reservoir decay rate can reduce t…
We derive a theory for Bose condensation in nonequilibrium steady states of bosonic quantum gases that are coupled both to a thermal heat bath and to a pumped reservoir (or gain medium), while suffering from loss. Such a scenario describes photonic many-body systems such as exciton-polariton gases. Our analysis is based on a set of kinetic equations for a gas of noninteracting bosons. By identifying a dimensionless scaling parameter controlling the boson density, we derive a sharp criterion for which system states become selected to host a macroscopic occupation. We show that with increasing p…
We demonstrate spontaneous formation of a nonlinear vortex cluster state in a microcavity exciton-polariton condensate with time-periodic sign flipping of its topological charges at the GHz scale. When optically pumped with a ring-shaped nonresonant laser, the trapped condensate experiences intricate high-order mode competition and fractures into two distinct trap levels. The resulting mode interference leads to robust condensate density beatings with periodic appearance of orderly arranged phase singularities. Our work opens new perspectives on creating structured free-evolving light, and sin…