English

Polariton vortex Chern insulator

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2023-09-19 v2 Quantum Gases

Abstract

We propose a vortex Chern insulator, motivated by recent experimental demonstrations on programmable arrangements of cavity polariton vortices by [Alyatkin et al., ArXiv:2207.01850 (2022)] and [Wang et al., National Sci. Rev. 10, Nwac096 (2022)]. In the absence of any external fields, time-reversal symmetry is spontaneously broken through polariton condensation into structured arrangements of localized co-rotating vortices. We characterize the response of the rotating condensate lattice by calculating the spectrum of Bogoliubov elementary excitations and observe the crossing of edge-states, of opposite vorticity, connecting bands with opposite Chern numbers. The emergent topologically nontrivial energy gap stems from inherent vortex anisotropic polariton-polariton interactions and does not require any spin-orbit coupling, external magnetic fields, or elliptically polarized pump fields.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.14998,
  title  = {Polariton vortex Chern insulator},
  author = {Stella L. Harrison and Anton Nalitov and Pavlos G. Lagoudakis and Helgi Sigurðsson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.14998},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:21:00.075Z