Hysteresis in linearly polarized nonresonantly driven exciton-polariton condensates

H Sigurdsson

doi:10.1103/physrevresearch.2.023323

Abstract

It is shown that a condensate of microcavity exciton-polaritons exhibits bistability between its two orthogonal linearly polarized components for varying nonresonant excitation power. A non-Hermitian splitting of these components results in two parity-symmetric fixed-point solutions of opposite polarization, making up the hysteresis branches. These solutions correspond to the lowest threshold linearly polarized mode, which dominates at low pump powers, and a cross-polarized mode, which appears due to nonlinear pinning at higher excitation powers. The spin symmetry of the solutions extends the nonresonant bistable operation of polariton condensates to the entire equatorial plane of the Poincare sphere. The results pave the way towards development of tailored bistable, linearly polarized, coherent sources of light.

Highlights

Semiconductor microcavity exciton-polaritons are spinor bosonic quasiparticles arising from the hybridization of microcavity embedded quantum well excitons and cavity photons in the strong light-matter coupling regime [1]
The parity symmetry of the two solutions generalizes the results to the entire equatorial plane of the Poincaré sphere, extending the application of polariton condensates in bistable spinoptronic devices
I theoretically demonstrated and analyzed a parity symmetry preserving hysteresis in a system of trapped driven-dissipative spinor exciton polariton condensates for varying nonresonant excitation powers. This effect is realized through splitting of the two orthogonal linearly polarized modes which importantly, experience different linewidths

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Semiconductor microcavity exciton-polaritons (here on polaritons) are spinor bosonic quasiparticles arising from the hybridization of microcavity embedded quantum well excitons and cavity photons in the strong light-matter coupling regime [1] These particles possess a number of desirable properties including a very high Kerr-like nonlinearity due to their excitonic component and very fast, picosecond scale, dynamical response times from their photonic component. At high-enough excitation densities the incoherent polaritons undergo stimulated bosonic scattering into a macroscopic coherent state which adopts a high degree of polarization [2,31] The condensate in this nonresonantly driven-dissipative regime can possess multible stable solutions depending on its general complexity such as connectivity to other condensates [12,32], spatial [33,34], and spin structure [16,17,35]. The bistability belongs to two parity symmetry preserving solutions of the condensate

SIGURDSSON

THEORY

N n S j where

CONCLUSION