Phase transitions of light in a dye-filled microcavity: observations and simulations

TL;DR

This paper discusses photon thermalisation and condensation in dye-filled microcavities, presenting experimental observations, a detailed physical model, and a new open-source simulation tool to explore photon condensates.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive physical model for photon condensation and provides an accessible Python package for simulating these phenomena.

Findings

Model accurately describes experimental results

Open-source Python package PyPBEC released

Enables simulation and exploration of photon condensates

Abstract

Photon thermalisation and condensation in dye-filled microcavities is a growing area of scientific interest, at the intersection of photonics, quantum optics and statistical physics. We give here a short introduction to the topic, together with an explanation of some of our more important recent results. A key result across several projects is that we have a model based on a detailed physical description which has been used to accurately describe experimental observations. We present a new open-source package in Python called PyPBEC which implements this model. The aim is to enable the reader to readily simulate and explore the physics of photon condensates themselves, so this article also includes a working example code which can be downloaded from the GitHub repository.