Topological spin Meissner effect in spinor exciton-polariton condensate: Constant amplitude solutions, half-vortices, and symmetry breaking

Abstract

We generalize the spin Meissner effect for exciton-polariton condensate confined in annular geometries to the case of non-trivial topology of the condensate wavefunction. In contrast to the conventional spin Meissner state, topological spin Meissner states can in principle be observed at arbitrary high magnetic field not limited by the critical magnetic field value for the condensate in a simply-connected geometry. One special example of the topological Meissner states are half-vortices. We show that in the absence of magnetic field half-vortices in a ring exist in a form of superposition of elementary half-vortex states which resolves recent experimental results where such puzzling superposition was observed. Furthermore, we show that if a pure half-vortex state is to be observed, a non-zero magnetic field of a specific magnitude needs to be applied. Studying exciton-polariton in a ring in presence of TE-TM splitting, we observe spin Meissner states which break rotational symmetry of the system by developing inhomogeneous density distributions. We classify various states arising in presence of non-zero TE-TM splitting based on what states they can be continued from by increasing the TE-TM splitting parameter from zero. With further increasing TE-TM splitting, states with broken symmetry may transform into stable half-dark solitons and therefore may serve as a useful tool to generate various non-trivial states of a spinor condensate.