Bose-Einstein condensation for trapped atomic polaritons in a biconical waveguide cavity

TL;DR

This paper explores high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensation of atom-light polaritons in a specially designed waveguide cavity, showing potential for room-temperature quantum phenomena with practical implications.

Contribution

It introduces a biconical waveguide cavity design that enables trapping and high-temperature BEC of polaritons, a novel approach in quantum optics.

Findings

Critical temperature can reach hundreds of Kelvin.

Polariton condensate exhibits Airy-shaped wave function.

Out-of-equilibrium oscillations occur with picosecond periods.

Abstract

We study the problem of high temperature Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of atom-light polaritons in a waveguide cavity appearing due to interaction of two-level atoms with (non-resonant) quantized optical radiation, in the strong coupling regime, in the presence of optical collisions (OCs) with buffer gas particles. Specifically, we propose a special biconical waveguide cavity (BWC), permitting localization and trapping of low branch (LB) polaritons imposed by the variation of the waveguide radius in longitudinal direction. We have shown that critical temperature of BEC occurring in the system can be high enough -- few hundred Kelvins; it is connected with photon-like character of LB polaritons and strongly depends on waveguide cavity parameters. In the case of a linear trapping potential we obtain an Airy-shaped polariton condensate wave function which, when disturbed out of equilibrium, exhibits small amplitude oscillations with the characteristic period in the picosecond domain.