Pumping-assisted multistability of exciton-polariton condensates

TL;DR

This paper explores how increasing pump power induces multistability in exciton-polariton condensates, revealing new steady and metastable states, including multi-peak solitons, with potential applications in polariton-based devices.

Contribution

It demonstrates the transition from monostability to multistability via exceptional points and identifies novel multi-peak soliton states in exciton-polariton condensates.

Findings

Multistability arises from spectrum splitting at exceptional points.

Metastable states have finite lifetimes and evolve into steady states.

Discovery of multi-peak soliton states in attractive polariton interactions.

Abstract

We investigate the multistability of exciton-polariton condensates excited by a nonresonant pump. An increase in pumping power moves the system away from non-Hermitian spectral degeneracy towards spectrum splitting through an exceptional point, which induces a transition from monostability to multistability. In the region of multistability, the system contains one steady and two metastable states. The analyses of stability show that metastable states maintain a finite lifetime and eventually evolve to steady states. A steady state with multi-peak soliton different from general single-peak soliton is discovered for attractive polariton-polariton interaction. Moreover, we depict the diagram of the multistability in full parameter space to accurately manipulate the multistability. Our results open up exciting possibilities for controlling non-Hermitian quantum multistable states, which may be useful to designing polariton-based devices exploiting optical multistability.