Enhanced coupling between ballistic exciton-polariton condensates through tailored pumping

Y. Wang, P. G. Lagoudakis, and H. Sigurdsson

Phys. Rev. B 106, 245304 – Published 19 December 2022

Abstract

We propose a method to enhance the spatial coupling between ballistic exciton-polariton condensates in a semiconductor microcavity based on available spatial light modulator technologies. Our method, verified by numerically solving a generalized Gross-Pitaevskii model, exploits the strong nonequilibrium nature of exciton-polariton condensation driven by localized nonresonant optical excitation. Tailoring the excitation beam profile from a Gaussian into a polygonal shape results in refracted and focused radial streams of outflowing polaritons from the excited condensate which can be directed towards nearest neighbors. Our method can be used to lower the threshold power needed to achieve polariton condensation and increase spatial coherence in extended systems, paving the way towards creating extremely large-scale quantum fluids of light.

Received 29 August 2022
Revised 3 November 2022
Accepted 6 December 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.106.245304

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Exciton polariton

Bose-Einstein condensates Quantum fluids & solids

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Y. Wang ¹, P. G. Lagoudakis ^2,1, and H. Sigurdsson ^1,3,*

¹School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom
²Hybrid Photonics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Territory of Innovation Center Skolkovo, Bolshoy Boulevard 30, Building 1, 121205 Moscow, Russia
³Science Institute, University of Iceland, Dunhagi 3, IS-107 Reykjavik, Iceland

^*h.sigurdsson@soton.ac.uk

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Vol. 106, Iss. 24 — 15 December 2022

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Images

Figure 1
(a),(d) Circular and triangular pump configurations and corresponding normalized condensate steady-state solutions ${| Ψ |}^{2}$ in (b),(e) real space and in (c),(f) momentum space. The green arrows in (b) illustrate the condensate flow emitted in all directions, and in (e), the thicker green arrows show the anisotropic and concentrated condensate flow. Notice how the triangular-shaped condensate in (e) is rotated by $π / 3$ with respect to the pump in (d).
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Figure 2
(a),(b) Triangular and circular pump profiles (red color) with overlaid schematic blue and yellow integration areas to determine the amount of condensate anisotropy in the system. (c) Example of pump profiles with zero, intermediate, and maximal inner curvature denoted $κ = 1 / R$ . The white dotted line indicates the circumscribed triangle. (d) The ratio of condensate particles (integrated density) between the blue and yellow areas $N_{A} / N_{B}$ for varying curvature for a fixed power density above threshold. The white bar in (a)–(c) is $10 μ m$ and the circular pump radius is $R_{0} = 11.5 μ m$ .
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Figure 3
Pump profiles structured into a hexagon with different relative orientation of the triangular spots: (a) side-side-, (b) side-vertex-, and (c) vertex-vertex-facing nearest neighbors. (d) A reference hexagon of circular spots. (e)–(h) Corresponding normalized condensate densities at $P_{0} = 1.1 P_{th}$ . (i) Corresponding number of condensate particles for increasing power density marking the different condensation thresholds for each configuration.
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Figure 4
(a) Normalized time-integrated condensate density $〈 | Ψ |^{2} 〉$ for triangular pump spots arranged into a honeycomb lattice. (b) Corresponding extracted mutual complex coherence function $μ_{1 n}$ . The color scale and arrow orientation depict the magnitude $| μ_{1 n} |$ and phase $θ_{1 n}$ , respectively. The central black arrow indicates the reference spot with zero phase. (c) The modulus of the coherence function as a function of absolute distance between the first and $n$ -th spots, $| r_{1} - r_{n} | = d_{1 n}$ . The black line is a fit of the stretched exponential function (9), which gives effective coherence length of $L_{coh} = 279.3 μ m$ .
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Figure 5
The modulus of the mutual coherence function $| μ_{1 n} |$ for increasing absolute condensate neighbor distance $d_{1 n}$ and different power densities (colors) for (a) triangular spots and (b) circular spots. Solid and dotted lines are fit using a stretched exponential function. (c) Corresponding power density scan of the mutual coherence between the first and the second condensate $| μ_{12} |$ for both configurations. (d) Corresponding effective coherence length extracted from fitting for both configurations. The color of the markers directly corresponds to the values on the horizontal axis in (c).
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