Exciton–polariton condensates

By Tim Byrnes, Na Young Kim, Yoshihisa Yamamoto. Nature Physics, 2014

689 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently a new type of system exhibiting spontaneous coherence has emerged—the exciton–polariton condensate. Exciton–polaritons (or polaritons for short) are bosonic quasiparticles that exist inside semiconductor microcavities, consisting of a superposition of an exciton and a cavity photon. Above a threshold density the polaritons macroscopically occupy the same quantum state, forming a condensate. The polaritons have a lifetime that is typically comparable to or shorter than thermalization times, giving them an inherently non-equilibrium nature. Nevertheless, they exhibit many of the features that would be expected of equilibrium Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs). The non-equilibrium nature of the system raises fundamental questions as to what it means for a system to be a BEC, and introduces new physics beyond that seen in other macroscopically coherent systems. In this review we focus on several physical phenomena exhibited by exciton–polariton condensates. In particular, we examine topics such as the difference between a polariton BEC, a polariton laser and a photon laser, as well as physical phenomena such as superfluidity, vortex formation, and Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless and Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer physics. We also discuss the physics and applications of engineered polariton structures. Exciton–polaritons, resulting from the light–matter coupling between an exciton and a photon in a cavity, form Bose–Einstein-like condensates above a critical density. Various aspects of the physics of exciton–polariton condensates are now reviewed.

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum Electrodynamic Control of Matter: Cavity-Enhanced Ferroelectric Phase Transition (2020, unknown): “[172] T.”
Keldysh field theory for driven open quantum systems (2015, methodology): “[148] Tim Byrnes, Na Young Kim, and Yoshihisa Yamamoto, “Exciton-polariton condensates,” Nat.”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “Several methods were developed to provide static or dynamically controlled in-plane potentials [111].”
Coupled Cluster Theory for Molecular Polaritons: Changing Ground and Excited States (2020, background): “Recent advances in experimental and theoretical research include new ways to generate exciton-polariton condensates [5], induce phase transitions [6–8], tune exciton energies in monolayers of 2D materials and interfaces [5,9,10], and even enhance the electron-phonon coupling, with possible effects o”
(INVITED) Vortex solitons: Old results and new perspectives (2019, background): “Results obtained for the “dark vortices”, starting from the earliest ones [86–88], have been collected in many publications dealing with various settings in photonics [89–95] (including exciton-polariton condensates [96–98], where the vortices exist in dissipative media) and BEC [61, 99–105], as wel”