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Physics Today

Experiments reveal a Bose–Einstein condensate of photons

R. Mark Wilson

Published Feb 1, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Key to the achievement is the confinement of photons and molecules in an optical cavity long enough for them to reach thermal equilibrium.
DOI
10.1063/1.3554306

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We theoretically analyze the temperature behavior of paraxial light in thermal equilibrium with a dye-filled optical microcavity. At low temperatures the photon gas undergoes Bose-Einstein condensation, and the photon number in the cavity ground state becomes macroscopic with respect to the total photon number. Owing to a grand-canonical excitation exchange between the photon gas and the dye molecule reservoir, a regime with unusually large fluctuations of the condensate number is predicted for this system that is not observed in present atomic physics Bose-Einstein condensation experiments.
We propose to thermalize a low-dimensional photon gas and obtain photonic Bose-Einstein condensation by optomechanical interactions in a microscopic optical cavity, with a single longitudinal mode and many transverse modes. The geometry of the short cavity is such that it provides a low-frequency cutoff at a photonic energy far above the thermal energy, so that thermal emission of photons is suppressed and the photon number is conserved. While previous experiments on photonic Bose-Einstein condensation have used dye molecules for photon gas thermalization, we here investigate thermalization owing to interactions with thermally fluctuating nanomechanical oscillators forming the cavity mirrors. In the quantum degenerate regime, the nanomechanical cavity converts broadband optical radiation into tuneable coherent radiation.