Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity of exciton-polaritons in microcavities

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• Prof Alexey Kavokin, U of Southampton
• Thursday 03 December 2009, 13:45-15:00
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Dimitri M Gangardt.

Exciton-polaritons are mixed light-matter quasiparticles which obey bosonic statistics. Being theoretically proposed in 1960s and experimentally observed in 1970s, the exciton polaritons have attracted a remarkable interest of the scientific community after 1992, when the strong coupling regime between an exciton and a cavity mode has been demonstrated experimentally in a GaAs based semiconductor microcavity. Further experiments have revealed unusual non-linear optical properties of the microcavities in the strong coupling regime. Non-linear amplification of the photoluminescence from these microcavities referred to as “polariton lasing” has been observed at liquide Helium temperature in GaAs and at room temperature in GaN microcavities. This effect originates from the bosonic amplification of exciton-polariton scattering. Having an effective mass a billion times lighter than Li atom, exciton polaritons are expected to undergo the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) at very high temperatures. In 2006 the BEC of exciton-polaritons has been observed at 5K [1], and already in 2008 the experimental evidence of room temperature BEC has been reported [2]. This year, two groups claimed observation of the superfluidity of exciton-polaritons [3]. In this talk I will address these recent discoveries and discuss the similarities and differences between polariton and atomic BEC .

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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