Cavity Polariton Condensate in a Disordered Environment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder affects a non-equilibrium exciton-polariton condensate in a ZnO microcavity, revealing that disorder induces intensity fluctuations and phase inhomogeneities that persist even at high densities.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence and a theoretical model showing that non-equilibrium condensates are more susceptible to disorder effects than equilibrium ones.

Findings

Disorder causes intensity fluctuations in the condensate emission.

Non-equilibrium effects prevent stabilization against disorder at high densities.

Theoretical simulations match experimental observations.

Abstract

We report on the influence of disorder on an exciton-polariton condensate in a ZnO based bulk planar microcavity and compare experimental results with a theoretical model for a non-equilibrium condensate. Experimentally, we detect intensity fluctuations within the far-field emission pattern even at high condensate densities which indicates a significant impact of disorder. We show that these effects rely on the driven dissipative nature of the condensate and argue that they can be accounted for by spatial phase inhomogeneities induced by disorder, which occur even for increasing condensate densities realized in the regime of high excitation power. Thus, non-equilibrium effects strongly suppress the stabilization of the condensate against disorder, contrarily to what is expected for equilibrium condensates in the high density limit. Numerical simulations based on our theoretical model reproduce the experimental data.