Exciton-polariton solitons in a semiconductor microwire of finite size

TL;DR

This paper studies bright exciton-polariton solitons in finite semiconductor microcavity wires, deriving exact solutions and analyzing how wire size influences the energy and dynamics of these nonlinear quasiparticles.

Contribution

It provides an exact analytical solution for bright polariton solitons in finite microcavity waveguides, highlighting the impact of wire size on soliton energy.

Findings

Exact soliton solutions expressed with Jacobi elliptic functions.

The size of the microwire significantly affects the energy of propagating solitons.

Balance between radiative losses and external pumping enables stable soliton propagation.

Abstract

Exciton-polariton solitons are strongly nonlinear quasiparticles composed of coupled exciton-photon states due to the interaction of light with matter. In semiconductor microcavity systems such as semiconductor micro and nanowires, polaritons are characterized by a negative mass which when combined with the repulsive nonlinear exciton-exciton interaction, leads to the generation of bright polariton solitons. In this work we investigate the dynamics of bright exciton-polariton solitons in a finite-size microcavity waveguide, for which radiative losses are assumed balanced by the external pumping. An exact bright-soliton solution to the model equations of motion, consisting of a periodic train of polariton pulses, is obtained in terms of Jacobi elliptic functions. Exact analytical expressions corresponding to the energies of both photonic and excitonic components of the pulse train are found. Results suggest that the size (i.e. the length) of a microwire waveguide plays a relevant role in obtaining a quantitative estimate of the energy that could be conveyed by polariton solitons propagating in the medium.