Dissipative soliton protocols in semiconductor microcavities at finite temperatures

Abstract

We consider exciton polaritons in a semiconductor microcavity with a saturable absorber in the growth direction of the heterostructure. This feature promotes additional nonlinear losses of the system with the emergence of bistability of the condensate particles number on the nonresonant (electrical or optical) excitation intensity. Further we demonstrate a new type of bright spatial dissipative exciton-polariton soliton which emerges in the equilibrium between the regions with different particle density. We develop protocols of soliton creation and destruction. The switch to a soliton-like behavior occurs if the cavity is exposed by a short strong laser pulse with certain energy and duration. We estimate the characteristic times of soliton switch on and off and the time of return to the initial cycle. In particular, we demonstrate surprising narrowing of the spatial profile of the soliton and its vanishing at certain temperature due to interaction of the system with the thermal bath of acoustic phonons. We also address the role of polariton-polariton interaction (Kerr-like nonlinearity) on formation of dissipative solitons and show that the soliton may exist both in its presence and absence.

Bright solitons in non-equilibrium coherent quantum matter

“…They have been predicted in several contexts [15,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42] and observed so far mostly in planar cavities [22,43,44]. In addition state-of-the-art investigations describe driven dissipative bright solitons under non-resonant excitation [45,46] for the repulsive BE condensate. In this work we provide an analytical mean field non-equilibrium theory for bright solitons and predict numerically the bright soliton patterns that emerge within an effectively attractive spinor condensate.…”

Observation of inversion, hysteresis, and collapse of spin in optically trapped polariton condensates

“…Suitable alternatives have been demonstrated for incoherently pumped polaritons using applied external electric fields, which can cause bistability due to density-dependent lifetimes of electron-hole tunneling [10,11], or through Pockelsinduced birefringence [12]. Theoretical schemes have been proposed to induce polariton bistability through modulational instability [13], through strongly saturated absorption [14], or between condensate wave functions of different parity [15].…”

Bosonic lasers: The state of the art (Review Article)

“…The resulting coherent state of polaritons is well described by a nonlinear Schrödinger equation (also known as a Gross-Pitaevskii equation), modified to account for gain and loss in the system [30]. Theoretical studies revealed that this equation supports a variety of spatially nontrivial structures, including: vortices and vortex lattices [31,32]; solitons [33][34][35][36][37]; and various other patterns [38][39][40].…”