Abstract
The Bose-Hubbard model (BHM) describes bosons hopping across sites and interacting on-site. Inspired by the success of BHM simulators with atoms in optical lattices, proposals for implementing the BHM with photons in coupled nonlinear cavities have recently emerged. Two coupled semiconductor microcavities constitute a model system where the hopping, interaction and decay of exciton polaritons—mixed light-matter quasiparticles—can be engineered in combination with site-selective coherent driving to implement the driven-dissipative two-site optical BHM. Here we explore the interplay of interference and nonlinearity in this system, in a regime where three distinct density profiles can be observed under identical driving conditions. We demonstrate how the phase acquired by polaritons hopping between cavities can be controlled through polariton-polariton interactions. Our results open new perspectives for synthesizing density-dependent gauge fields using polaritons in two-dimensional multicavity systems.
Highlights
The Bose-Hubbard model (BHM) describes bosons hopping across sites and interacting on-site
Photonic systems have been proposed for simulating the hopping and interaction of bosonic particles as described by the Bose-Hubbard model (BHM), but in non-equilibrium conditions[2,3,4,5]
Under time-harmonic driving of one site, the mean fields cj of the driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard dimer (BHD) are described by the coupled equations: Results
Summary
Processes involving the driving laser and the hopping energy J (determining the bonding-antibonding splitting) generate new frequencies, that is, a signal and an idler[16]. Since polaritons must hop twice to interfere with the driving field in the first cavity, the stationary population depends on the round-trip phase 2(f1–f2). The observation of this density-dependent interference demonstrates that the hopping phase can be optically controlled through interactions
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