Polariton pattern formation and photon statistics of the associated emission

TL;DR

This paper investigates how polariton fluids in microcavities form complex spatial patterns and exhibit unique photon statistics due to nonlinear scattering processes, with experimental and numerical analysis revealing symmetry breaking and pattern competition.

Contribution

It demonstrates the spontaneous formation of polygonal patterns and associated photon statistics in polariton fluids, combining experimental observations with linear stability analysis.

Findings

Diverse transverse polygon patterns form spontaneously.

Second order coherence $g^{(2)}(0)$ spikes due to nonlinear scattering.

Numerical analysis predicts pattern formation and symmetry breaking.

Abstract

We report on the formation of a diverse family of transverse spatial polygon patterns in a microcavity polariton fluid under coherent driving by a blue-detuned pump. Patterns emerge spontaneously as a result of energy-degenerate polariton-polariton scattering from the pump state to interfering high order vortex and antivortex modes, breaking azimuthal symmetry. The interplay between a multimode parametric instability and intrinsic optical bistability leads to a sharp spike in the value of second order coherence $g^{(2)}(0)$ of the emitted light, which we attribute to the strongly superlinear kinetics of the underlying scattering processes driving the formation of patterns. We show numerically by means of a linear stability analysis how the growth of parametric instabilities in our system can lead to spontaneous symmetry breaking, predicting the formation and competition of different pattern states in good agreement with experimental observations.