Macroscopic quantum self-trapping and Josephson oscillations of exciton polaritons

By M. Abbarchi, A. Amo, V. G. Sala, D. Solnyshkov, H. Flayac, L. Ferrier, Isabelle Sagnes, É. Galopin, A. Lemaître, G. Malpuech and 1 more. Nature Physics, 2012

271 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Josephson effects that arise when two quantum states are coupled through a barrier are difficult to observe in optical systems because photon–photon interactions are so weak. Researchers have now demonstrated an optical realization of two such phenomena—macroscopic self-trapping and Josephson oscillations—using polariton condensates in overlapping microcavities. The coupling of two macroscopic quantum states through a tunnel barrier gives rise to Josephson phenomena1 such as Rabi oscillations2, the a.c. and d.c. effects3, or macroscopic self-trapping, depending on whether tunnelling or interactions dominate4. Nonlinear Josephson physics was first observed in superfluid helium5 and atomic condensates6,7, but it has remained inaccessible in photonic systems because it requires large photon–photon interactions. Here we report on the observation of nonlinear Josephson oscillations of two coupled polariton condensates confined in a photonic molecule formed by two overlapping micropillars etched in a semiconductor microcavity8. At low densities we observe coherent oscillations of particles tunnelling between the two sites. At high densities, interactions quench the transfer of particles, inducing the macroscopic self-trapping of polaritons in one of the micropillars9,10. The finite lifetime results in a dynamical transition from self-trapping to oscillations with π phase. Our results open the way to the experimental study of highly nonlinear regimes in photonic systems, such as chaos11,12,13 or symmetry-breaking bifurcations14,15.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e31e2cc8d10d51fec65c20424f2f28d0a00adb9

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Observation of a Dissipation-Induced Classical to Quantum Transition (2013, background): “The transition demonstrated in this work stands in sharp contrast to atomic and po- laritonic BECs, for which the low-density dynamics is linear [16, 17, 49], and where dissipation drives the system into a delocalized classical state [21] [50].”
Spin-Orbit Coupling for Photons and Polaritons in Microstructures (2014, result): “Thanks to the spatial overlap of adjacent micropillars, the photons can tunnel between neighboring sites [29,30] with an amplitude that is different for the polarization states parallel and orthogonal to the link direction, as recently reported in Ref.”
Spontaneous mirror-symmetry breaking in coupled photonic-crystal nanolasers (2014, methodology): “3c as a function of instantaneous pump power, together with a numerical integration of equations (1).”
Quantum simulation with interacting photons (2016, methodology): “The interplay of interactions and tunnelling between adjacent lattice sites has also been investigated in two experiments with two coupled resonators [1, 204].”
Exciton-polaritons in lattices: A non-linear photonic simulator (2016, background): “4 shows the evolution of a polariton wavepacket initialised by resonant pulsed excitation of one of the two coupled micropillars (labelled R in the figure) in three different regimes [79].”