Towards spin turbulence of light: Spontaneous disorder and chaos in cavity-polariton systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel mechanism for generating spin chaos in light emitted from exciton polaritons in microcavities, resembling turbulent states, with potential for ultrafast spin modulation.

Contribution

It proposes a new physical mechanism for spin turbulence in light from microcavity polaritons, linking spin symmetry breaking and Bogolyubov excitations.

Findings

Spontaneous spin chaos observed in polariton systems.

Mechanism enables ultrafast spin modulation at picosecond and micrometer scales.

Chaotic states resemble hydrodynamic turbulence.

Abstract

Recent advances in nanophotonics have brought about coherent light sources with chaotic circular polarization; a low-dimensional chaotic evolution of optical spin was evidenced in laser diodes. Here we propose a mechanism that gives rise to light with a spatiotemporal spin chaos resembling turbulent states in hydrodynamics. The spin-chaotic radiation is emitted by exciton polaritons under resonant optical pumping in arbitrarily sized planar microcavities, including, as a limiting case, pointlike systems with only three degrees of freedom. The underlying mechanism originates in the interplay between spin symmetry breakdown and scattering into pairs of Bogolyubov excitations. As a practical matter, it opens up the way for spin modulation of light on the scale of picoseconds and micrometers.