Polariton Pattern Formation and Photon Statistics of the Associated Emission

Abstract

We report on the formation of a diverse family of transverse spatial polygon patterns in a microcavity polariton fluid under coherent driving by a blue-detuned pump. Patterns emerge spontaneously as a result of energy-degenerate polariton-polariton scattering from the pump state to interfering high order vortex and antivortex modes, breaking azimuthal symmetry. The interplay between a multimode parametric instability and intrinsic optical bistability leads to a sharp spike in the value of second order coherence g (2) (0) of the emitted light, which we attribute to the strongly superlinear kinetics of the underlying scattering processes driving the formation of patterns. We show numerically by means of a linear stability analysis how the growth of parametric instabilities in our system can lead to spontaneous symmetry breaking, predicting the formation and competition of different pattern states in good agreement with experimental observations. PACS numbers: Valid PACS appear here arXiv:1612.03048v2 [cond-mat.mes-hall]

Formation dynamics of exciton-polariton vortices created by nonresonant annular pumping

“…Subsequently the formation of condensates inside natural traps, 2 fabricated traps, [3][4][5] and optically imprinted trapping potentials has been studied. [6][7][8] Also tailored flow control [9][10][11][12] and pattern formation [13][14][15] of polaritons in 2D microcavities were shown. In this work we focus on observing the formation of exciton polariton vortices, which feature a 2π•m radial phase change of the polariton wavefunction with the topological charge m and a phase singularity in the centre of the vortex corresponding to a minimum in the polariton density function, i.e.…”

Distinguishing intrinsic photon correlations from external noise with frequency-resolved homodyne detection

“… 23 , 24 . An exception to is the case of resonant excitation, where the polaritons can obtain coherence from the pump laser 25 . When increasing the excitation power, decreases towards a value close to 1 within a narrow range of powers in the threshold region, but then increases again towards a value between 1 and 2, which is roughly constant over a larger range of powers, see e.g.…”

Nonlinear optics of coupled nanophotonic reasonators

“…Polaritons show a number of nonlinear e↵ects such as: superfluid behaviour [91][92][93], formation of quantized vortices [94][95][96], solitons [97][98][99][100][101][102], spatial nontrivial patterns [103][104][105][106][107], bistability [108][109][110][111][112], optical parametric scattering [113][114][115][116], etc.…”

“…The overall motivation of studying these solitons has been that they are expected to be useful for information processing and building blocks for polaritonic circuits [101,194]. The polariton-polariton interaction also gives rise to formation of patterns [103,105,107,159], soliton trains [195], solitons that emit radiation in the backward direction [196], etc. These patterns are also expected to play a key role in future polaritonic circuits [159,195,196].…”

“…were found to form spatial patterns [104,107,159,314,315], where topologically stable structures were considered as a memory [100,316] and pattern transitions could e↵ectively compose switches [276]. There has also been a growing interest in studying polaritons in periodic potentials [165], which have allowed the routing of polaritons [18,279], gap and lattice solitons [155,193,194], and the formation of spin-ordered patterns [151] for information processing.…”