Spin-Orbit Coupling for Photons and Polaritons in Microstructures

By V. G. Sala, D. Solnyshkov, I. Carusotto, T. Jacqmin, A. Lemaître, H. Terças, A. Nalitov, M. Abbarchi, É. Galopin, Isabelle Sagnes and 3 more. 2014

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use coupled micropillars etched out of a semiconductor microcavity to engineer a spin-orbit Hamiltonian for photons and polaritons in a microstructure. The coupling between the spin and orbital momentum arises from the polarization-dependent confinement and tunneling of photons between adjacent micropillars arranged in the form of a hexagonal photonic molecule. It results in polariton eigenstates with distinct polarization patterns, which are revealed in photoluminescence experiments in the regime of polariton condensation. Thanks to the strong polariton nonlinearities, our system provides a photonic workbench for the quantum simulation of the interplay between interactions and spin-orbit effects, particularly when extended to two-dimensional lattices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/687db84413bc28c3d429af9853c5a408f4f8a3a2

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Topological photonics (2018, methodology): “From the experimental point of view, the study of the interplay of lasing with geometrical and topological features was initiated by Sala et al. (2015).”
Exciton-polaritons in lattices: A non-linear photonic simulator (2016, background): “If additionally the polarisation degree of freedom of polaritons is taken into account, it has been recently shown that a spin–orbit coupling Hamiltonian can be engineered using a hexagonal structure [84,85].”
Type-III and Tilted Dirac Cones Emerging from Flat Bands in Photonic Orbital Graphene (2018, background): “2(b), the pmodes show a small splitting arising from small anisotropy in the shape of the pillar and from polarization-momentum coupling characteristic of semiconductor microcavities [38,39].”
(INVITED) Vortex solitons: Old results and new perspectives (2019, background): “Two-dimensional vortex patterns in dissipative media may be also supported by the linear gain applied in an appropriately defined spatially confined area, such as a ring-shaped one [291] (experimentally, a similar structure was created for pumping a spin-orbit-coupled exciton-polariton condensate in”
Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, background): “Interaction effects are incorporated in exciton polaritons [36, 58] and circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) [59], where bosonic excitations are manipulated through their coupling to electrons exposed to magnetic fields or Josephson-junction rings penetrated by magnetic fluxes.”
Frontiers in multidimensional self-trapping of nonlinear fields and matter (2019, background): “The available technology of microcavity structuring has made it possible to create various lattice potentials in them [116,117], and thus to observe 1D [118] and 2D [119] gap polariton solitons (see also [121,122] for a detailed theoretical analysis).”