We demonstrate the creation of vortices in a macroscopically occupied polariton state formed in a semiconductor microcavity. A weak external laser beam carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) is used to imprint a vortex on the condensate arising from
the polariton optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The vortex core radius is found to decrease with increasing pump power, and is determined by polariton-polariton interactions. As a result of OAM conservation in the parametric scattering process, the excitation consists of a vortex in the signal and a corresponding anti-vortex in the idler of the OPO. The experimental results are in good agreement with a theoretical model of a vortex in the polariton OPO.
Polariton condensates are investigated in periodical potentials created by surface acoustic waves using both resonant and non-resonant optical excitation. Under resonant pumping condensates are formed due to polariton parametric scattering from the p
ump. In this case the single particle dispersion in the presence of the condensate shows a strong reduction of the energy gap arising from the acoustic modulation, indicating efficient screening of the surface acoustic wave potential by spatial modulation of the polariton density. The observed results are in good agreement with a model based on generalised Gross-Pitaveskii equations with account taken of the spatial dependence of the exciton energy landscape. In the case of incoherent, non-resonant pumping coexisting non-equilibrium condensates with s- and p- type wavefunctions are observed, which have different energies, symmetry and spatial coherence. The energy splitting between these condensate states is also reduced with respect to the gap of the one particle spectrum below threshold, but the screening effect is less pronounced than in the case of resonantly pumped system due to weaker modulation of the pump state.
Microcavity polaritons are composite half-light half-matter quasi-particles, which have recently been demonstrated to exhibit rich physical properties, such as non-equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation, parametric scattering and superfluidity. At th
e same time, polaritons have some important advantages over photons for information processing applications, since their excitonic component leads to weaker diffraction and stronger inter-particle interactions, implying, respectively, tighter localization and lower powers for nonlinear functionality. Here we present the first experimental observations of bright polariton solitons in a strongly coupled semiconductor microcavity. The polariton solitons are shown to be non-diffracting high density wavepackets, that are strongly localised in real space with a corresponding broad spectrum in momentum space. Unlike solitons known in other matter-wave systems such as Bose condensed ultracold atomic gases, they are non-equilibrium and rely on a balance between losses and external pumping. Microcavity polariton solitons are excited on picosecond timescales, and thus have significant benefits for ultrafast switching and transfer of information over their light only counterparts, semiconductor cavity lasers (VCSELs), which have only nanosecond response time.
Real and momentum space spectrally resolved images of microcavity polariton emission in the regime of condensation are investigated under non resonant excitation using a laser source with reduced intensity fluctuations on the timescale of the exciton
lifetime. We observe that the polariton emission consists of many macroscopically occupied modes. Lower energy modes are strongly localized by the photonic potential disorder on a scale of few microns. Higher energy modes have finite k-vectors and are delocalized over 10-15 microns. All the modes exhibit long range spatial coherence comparable to their size. We provide a theoretical model describing the behavior of the system with the results of the simulations in good agreement with the experimental observations. We show that the multimode emission of the polariton condensate is a result of its nonequilibrium character, the interaction with the local photonic potential and the reduced intensity fluctuations of the excitation laser.
The authors report the observation of electroluminescence from GaAs-based semiconductor microcavities in the strong coupling regime. At low current densities the emission consists of two peaks, which exhibit anti-crossing behaviour as a function of d
etection angle and thus originate from polariton states. With increasing carrier injection we observe a progressive transition from strong to weak coupling due to screening of the exciton resonance by free carriers. The demonstration that polariton emission can be excited by electrical injection is encouraging for future development of polariton lasers.
