Crossover from exciton-polariton to photon Bose-Einstein condensation
Abstract
BEC of exciton-polaritons and related effects such as superfluidity1,2, spontaneous symmetry breaking3,4 and quantised vortices5,6 open way to creation of novel light sources7 and optical logic elements8. Remarkable observations of exciton-polariton BEC in microcavities9-12 have been reported in the recent ten years. Very recently, thermalisation and subsequent condensation of cavity photons in a dye-filled microcavity have been observed13. Here we show that BEC of both exciton-polaritons and photons can be created in the same system under different optical excitation conditions. A dynamic phase transition between a photon and a polariton BEC takes place after a single high-power excitation pulse and we find both condensed states in thermal equilibrium with the excited states. At the crossover, photons and polaritons coexist, which results in a decrease in the long-range spatial coherence. Build-up and successive depinning of polarisation is observed at the threshold of both polariton and photon condensation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1103.4831,
title = {Crossover from exciton-polariton to photon Bose-Einstein condensation},
author = {Elena Kammann and Hamid Ohadi and Maria Maragkou and Alexey V. Kavokin and Pavlos G. Lagoudakis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.4831},
year = {2012}
}