Observation of Zitterbewegung in photonic microcavities

Abstract

We present and experimentally study the effects of the photonic spin-orbit coupling on real space propagetion of polariton wavepackets in planar semiconductor microcavities and polaritonic analogs of graphene. In particular, we demonstrate the appearance of an analog Zitterbewegung effect, a term which translates as 'trembling motion' in english, which was originally proposed for relativistic Dirac electrons and consists of the oscillations of the center of mass of a wavepacket in the direction perpendicular to its propagation. For a planar microcavity we observe regular Zitterbewegung oscillations whose amplitude and period depend on the wavevector of the polaritons. We then extend these results to a honeycomb lattice of coupled microcavity resonators. Compared to the planar cavity such lattices are inherently more tuneable and versatile, allowing simulation of the Hamilitonians of a wide range of important physical systems. We observe an oscillation pattern related to the presence of the spin-split Dirac cones in the dispersion. In both cases the experimentally observed oscillations are in good agreement with theoretical modelling and independently measured bandstructure parameters, providing strong evidence for the observation of Zitterbewegung.

References in corpus (6)

• Zitterbewegung of electronic wave packets in semiconductor nanostructures
• Half-solitons in a polariton quantum fluid behave like magnetic monopoles
• Spin-orbit coupling and optical spin Hall effect in photonic graphene
• Oscillatory multiband dynamics of free particles: The ubiquity of zitterbewegung effects
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• Persistent polarization oscillations in ring-shape polariton condensates
• An experimental scheme for determining the Berry phase in two-dimensional quantum materials with a flat band
• Scalar Product for a Version of Minisuperspace Model with Grassmann Variables
• Zitterbewegung, momentum and spin dynamics of electromagnetic waves in linear dielectric medium
• Topological quantum electrodynamics in synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields