Noncritical Slowing Down of Photonic Condensation

Abstract

We investigate the response of a photonic gas interacting with a reservoir of pumped dye molecules to quenches in the pump power. In addition to the expected dramatic critical slowing down of the equilibration time around phase transitions, we find extremely slow equilibration even far away from phase transitions. This noncritical slowing down can be accounted for quantitatively by fierce competition among cavity modes for access to the molecular environment, and we provide a quantitative explanation for this noncritical slowing down.

Collective excitation profiles and the dynamics of photonic condensates

“…With the construction of the excitation profiles and their hierarchical classification one can substantially reduce the numerical effort required for such analyses. Simulations that are being enabled with this approach feature dynamical phase transitions [24], and pronounced changes in the equilibration time under changes in pump power. Beyond the wellestablished phenomenon of slowing down of system dynamics close to such phase transitions, photonic condensates also feature this phenomenon far away from phase transitions where the system does not behave critically.…”

Spontaneous coherence in spatially extended photonic systems: Non-Equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation

“…Measurements of sonic dispersion features of polariton BECs under incoherent pumping have been reported in [201,202]. Pioneering studies of the dynamics of photon BECs were reported in [203].…”

Learning the Fuzzy Phases of Small Photonic Condensates

“…47 It captures several processes associated with the resulting mode-mode competition, including decondensation phase transitions 27 and non-critical slowing down. 48 At the mean-field level, the model is reduced to a set of rate equations for the mode occupation numbers n m , namely…”

“…( 2) and ( 4) can be greatly reduced by approximating the full spatial resolution of the model with a hierarchy of collective molecular modes F m . 48,49 Sufficiently accurate results can be obtained by truncating the hierarchy after a few orders. In the collective mode picture, Eq.…”