Spanning the full Poincaré sphere with polariton Rabi oscillations

Abstract

We propose theoretically and demonstrate experimentally a generation of light pulses whose polarization varies temporally to cover selected areas of the Poincaré sphere with tunable swirling speed and total duration (1 ps and 10 ps respectively in our implementation). The effect relies on the Rabi oscillations of two polarized fields in the strong coupling regime, excited by two counter-polarized and delayed pulses. The interferences of the oscillating fields result in the precession of the Stokes vector of the emitted light while polariton lifetime imbalance results in its drift from a circle on the sphere of controllable radius to a single point at long times. The positioning of the initial and final states allows to engineer the type of polarization spanning, including a full sweeping of the Poincaré sphere. The universality and simplicity of the scheme should allow for the deployment of time varying polarization fields at a technologically exploitable level.

6 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary videos: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0QCllnLqdyBSHNtSjlyWjN1UFU

References in corpus (4)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Luminescence Spectra of Quantum Dots in Microcavities. I. Bosons
• Ultrafast control of Rabi oscillations in a polariton condensate
• Control of populations of two-level systems by a single resonant laser pulse

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