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A principle of hierarchical entropy maximization is proposed for generalized superstatistical systems, which are characterized by the existence of three levels of dynamics. If a generalized superstatistical system comprises a set of superstatistical subsystems, each made up of a set of cells, then the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy should be maximized first for each cell, second for each subsystem, and finally for the whole system. Hierarchical entropy maximization naturally reflects the sufficient time-scale separation between different dynamical levels and allows one to find the distribution of both the intensive parameter and the control parameter for the corresponding superstatistics. The hierarchical maximum entropy principle is applied to fluctuations of the photon Bose-Einstein condensate in a dye microcavity. This principle provides an alternative to the master equation approach recently applied to this problem. The possibility of constructing generalized superstatistics based on a statistics different from the Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics is pointed out.

A theory of Bose-Einstein condensation of light in a dye-filled optical microcavity is presented. The theory is based on the hierarchical maximum entropy principle and allows one to investigate the fluctuating behavior of the photon gas in the microcavity for all numbers of photons, dye molecules, and excitations at all temperatures, including the whole critical region. The master equation describing the interaction between photons and dye molecules in the microcavity is derived and the equivalence between the hierarchical maximum entropy principle and the master equation approach is shown. The cases of a fixed mean total photon number and a fixed total excitation number are considered, and a much sharper, nonparabolic onset of a macroscopic Bose-Einstein condensation of light in the latter case is demonstrated. The theory does not use the grand canonical approximation, takes into account the photon polarization degeneracy, and exactly describes the microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic Bose-Einstein condensation of light. Under certain conditions, it predicts sub-Poissonian statistics of the photon condensate and the polarized photon condensate, and a universal relation takes place between the degrees of second-order coherence for these condensates. In the macroscopic case, there appear a sharp jump in the degrees of second-order coherence, a sharp jump and kink in the reduced standard deviations of the fluctuating numbers of photons in the polarized and whole condensates, and a sharp peak, a cusp, of the Mandel parameter for the whole condensate in the critical region. The possibility of nonclassical light generation in the microcavity with the photon Bose-Einstein condensate is predicted.

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A method of determining the temperature of the nonradiative reservoir in a microcavity excitonpolariton system is developed. A general relation for the homogeneous polariton linewidth is theoretically derived and experimentally used in the method. In experiments with a GaAs microcavity under nonresonant pulsed excitation, the reservoir temperature dynamics is extracted from the polariton linewidth. Within the first nanosecond the reservoir temperature greatly exceeds the lattice temperature and determines the dynamics of the major processes in the system. It is shown that, for nonresonant pulsed excitation of GaAs microcavities, the polariton Bose-Einstein condensation is typically governed by polariton-phonon scattering, while interparticle scattering leads to condensate depopulation.