Spontaneous symmetry breaking in a polariton and photon laser

Abstract

We report on the simultaneous observation of spontaneous symmetry breaking and long-range spatial coherence both in the strong and the weak-coupling regime in a semiconductor microcavity. Under pulsed excitation, the formation of a stochastic order parameter is observed in polariton and photon lasing regimes. Single-shot measurements of the Stokes vector of the emission exhibit the buildup of stochastic polarization. Below threshold, the polarization noise does not exceed 10%, while above threshold we observe a total polarization of up to 50% after each excitation pulse, while the polarization averaged over the ensemble of pulses remains nearly zero. In both polariton and photon lasing regimes, the stochastic polarization buildup is accompanied by the buildup of spatial coherence. We find that the Landau criterion of spontaneous symmetry breaking and Penrose-Onsager criterion of long-range order for Bose-Einstein condensation are met in both polariton and photon lasing regimes.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical microcavity
• Spontaneous Polarisation Build up in a Room Temperature Polariton Laser
• Photon lasing in a GaAs microcavity: similarities with a polariton condensate

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• Spin polarization of exciton-polariton condensate in a photonic synthetic effective magnetic field
• Jitter of condensation time and dynamics of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a gas of microcavity polaritons
• Quantum theory of polariton weak lasing and polarization bifurcations
• Collective excitations of exciton-polariton condensates in a synthetic gauge field