Optical properties of a highly-excited exciton-polariton condensate

夏子 石田

Shoko Utsunomiya, Lin Tian, Georgios Roumpos +8 more

Elena Kammann, Hamid Ohadi, Maria Maragkou +2 more

BEC of exciton-polaritons and related effects such as superfluidity1,2, spontaneous symmetry breaking3,4 and quantised vortices5,6 open way to creation of novel light sources7 and optical logic elements8. Remarkable observations of exciton-polariton BEC in microcavities9-12 have been reported in the recent ten years. Very recently, thermalisation and subsequent condensation of cavity photons in a dye-filled microcavity have been observed13. Here we show that BEC of both exciton-polaritons and photons can be created in the same system under different optical excitation conditions. A dynamic phase transition between a photon and a polariton BEC takes place after a single high-power excitation pulse and we find both condensed states in thermal equilibrium with the excited states. At the crossover, photons and polaritons coexist, which results in a decrease in the long-range spatial coherence. Build-up and successive depinning of polarisation is observed at the threshold of both polariton and photon condensation.

Y. Yamamoto, Hui Deng, H. Haug

Eliezer Estrecho, Tingge Gao, Nataliya Bobrovska +9 more

A bosonic condensate of exciton polaritons in a semiconductor microcavity is a macroscopic quantum state subject to pumping and decay. The fundamental nature of this driven-dissipative condensate is still under debate. Here, we gain an insight into spontaneous condensation by imaging long-lifetime exciton polaritons in a high-quality inorganic microcavity in a single-shot optical excitation regime, without averaging over multiple condensate realisations. We demonstrate that condensation is strongly influenced by an incoherent reservoir and that the reservoir depletion, the so-called spatial hole burning, is critical for the transition to the ground state. Condensates of photon-like polaritons exhibit strong shot-to-shot fluctuations and density filamentation due to the effective self-focusing associated with the reservoir depletion. In contrast, condensates of exciton-like polaritons display smoother spatial density distributions and are second-order coherent. Our observations show that the single-shot measurements offer a unique opportunity to study fundamental properties of non-equilibrium condensation in the presence of a reservoir.

Vladimir P. Kochereshko, А. В. Платонов, N. G. Filosofov +5 more

Abstract The dependences of the exciton-polariton photoluminescence spectra on the intensity of optical excitation and external magnetic fields are investigated in cylindrical mesas based on high-quality microcavities. It was found that with an increase of the intensity of optical excitation above a certain threshold at sufficiently large magnetic field or with an increase of magnetic fields at constant optical excitation, the distribution of exciton-polaritons over Zeeman sublevels becomes substantially non-Boltzmannian.