Coherent Flow and Trapping of Polariton Condensates with Long Lifetime

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons in high-quality microcavities, showing dissipationless flow over long distances and trapping at high densities, revealing new insights into polariton coherence and dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces microcavities with extremely high quality factors enabling long polariton lifetimes and observes coherent flow and trapping phenomena in polariton condensates.

Findings

Dissipationless polariton flow over hundreds of microns

Flow stops and trapping occurs at high densities

Strong coherence observed in trapped polariton gas

Abstract

We report new results of Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons in specially designed microcavities with very high quality factor, on the order of $10^6$, giving the polariton lifetimes of the order of 100 ps. When the polaritons are created with an incoherent pump, a dissipationless, coherent flow of the polaritons occurs over hundreds of microns, which increases as density increases. At high density, this flow is suddenly stopped, and the gas becomes trapped in a local potential minimum, with strong coherence.