English

Theory of two-component superfluidity of microcavity polaritons

Quantum Gases 2025-12-18 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We develop a microscopic mean-field theory describing the coexistence of Bose-Einstein condensates of upper and lower polaritons (UP/LP) in a semiconductor microcavity. Incorporating interbranch scattering within a modified polariton Hamiltonian, we introduce a phenomenological population-split parameter α\alpha that quantifies the relative LP/UP occupations. At zero detuning, the critical temperature becomes independent of α\alpha, converging to a single value that marks the balanced, resonant regime. Away from resonance, variations in α\alpha lead to distinctive and experimentally resolvable changes in both the sound velocity csc_s and critical temperature TcT_c, relative to the single-component (LP-only) condensate limit. The system under study consists of excitons confined in a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayer, particularly WSe2_2 embedded within a planar optical microcavity of GaAs where they strongly couple to cavity photons. Our analysis focuses on monolayer WSe2_2 embdedded in a GaAs microcavity. We present results for GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells embedded in a GaAs microcavity in the Appendix. While mean-field in scope, the framework provides analytic benchmarks and physical insight for future treatments that include dissipation and fluctuations in nonequilibrium polariton superfluids.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.18491,
  title  = {Theory of two-component superfluidity of microcavity polaritons},
  author = {A. Nafis Arafat and Oleg L. Berman and Godfrey Gumbs and Peter B. Littlewood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.18491},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

25 pages, 13 figures