Polarization dynamics in a photon BEC
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
2017-10-18 v2 Quantum Gases
Abstract
It has previously been shown that a dye-filled microcavity can produce a Bose-Einstein condensate of photons. Thermalization of photons is possible via repeated absorption and re-emission by the dye molecules. In this paper, we theoretically explore the behavior of the polarization of light in this system. We find that in contrast to the near complete thermalization between different spatial modes of light, thermalization of polarization states is expected to generally be incomplete. We show that the polarization degree changes significantly from below to above threshold, and explain the dependence of polarization on all relevant material parameters.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.01738,
title = {Polarization dynamics in a photon BEC},
author = {Ryan I. Moodie and Peter Kirton and Jonathan Keeling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01738},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
9 pages, 6 figures. Updated to published version