Parity breakdown, vortices, and dark soliton states in a Bose gas of resonantly excited polaritons

TL;DR

This paper predicts a new parity breakdown mechanism in resonantly excited polariton Bose gases, leading to polarization domains, dark solitons, and vortices with complex interactions and ordered structures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel parity breakdown mechanism and explores the formation of vortices, dark solitons, and their interactions in polariton Bose gases under resonant excitation.

Findings

Parity breakdown causes polarization domain formation.

Dark solitons can propagate without dissipation.

Vortices and vortex-antivortex pairs form with large-scale interactions.

Abstract

A new mechanism of parity breakdown in a spinor Bose gas is predicted; it causes a single-mode state of polaritons to be spontaneously divided into different polarization domains which annihilate each other at the interface areas. In a polariton wire, such interface is a dark soliton that can run in space without dissipation. In a planar cavity, quantized vortices arise in which phase difference of orthogonally polarized components makes one complete turn around the core. Coupled vortex-antivortex pairs and straight filaments can form in analogy to Bose-Einstein condensates and superconductors. However, the rotational symmetry is broken even for individual vortices, which makes them interact on a large scale and form internally ordered structures. These states come into being under resonant excitation if the spin coupling rate significantly exceeds the decay rate.