Polarization and Phase Textures in Lattice Plasmon Condensates

Abstract

Polarization textures of light may reflect fundamental phenomena, such as topological defects, and can be utilized in engineering light beams. They have been observed, for instance, in photonic crystal lasers and semiconductor polariton condensates. Here we demonstrate domain wall polarization textures in a plasmonic lattice Bose–Einstein condensate. A key ingredient of the textures is found to be a condensate phase that varies spatially in a nontrivial manner. The phase of the Bose–Einstein condensate is reconstructed from the real- and Fourier-space images using a phase retrieval algorithm. We introduce a simple theoretical model that captures the results and can be used for design of the polarization patterns and demonstrate that the textures can be optically switched. The results open new prospects for fundamental studies of non-equilibrium condensation and sources of polarization-structured beams.

Scattering dominated spatial coherence and phase correlation properties in plasmonic lattice lasers

“…Thus, the features in the far field are localized in the direction in which the source plane spatial coherence extends over the entire lattice. Similar phase dependent behaviour was recently demonstrated in 2D plasmonic condensates [23]. The angular divergences obtained from these images are δθ x = 0.48 • , δθ y = 0.50 • for figure 3(a), which, assuming a fully coherent beam gives a spatial coherence width of δx = 2 × π/δk x = 104 µm, and δy = 2 × π/δk y = 101 µm.…”