Searching for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang phase in microcavity polaritons

Abstract

Recent approximate analytical work has suggested that, at certain values of the external pump, the optical parametric oscillator (OPO) regime of microcavity polaritons may provide a long-sought realization of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) physics in 2D. Here, by solving the full microscopic model numerically using the truncated Wigner method, we prove that this predicted KPZ phase for OPO is robust against the appearance of vortices or other effects. For those pump strengths, spatial correlations in the direction perpendicular to the pump, and the distribution of phase fluctuations, match closely to the forms characteristic of the KPZ universality. This strongly indicates the viability of observing KPZ behavior in future polariton OPO experiments.

Unconventional Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition in the Multicomponent Polariton System

“…In the context of driven-dissipative polariton fluids [6,7], numerical studies of incoherently driven [8,9], as well as coherently driven systems in the OPO regime [10], have predicted a non-equilibrium-type BKT phase transition, recently confirmed in an experiment [11]. Finally, the presence of further qualitative corrections to the standard BKT picture introduced by higher-order phase fluctuations treated within the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang framework has been proposed [12][13][14][15].…”

Unconventional Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition in the Multicomponent Polariton System

“…We proceed by checking the diffusion coefficients of the quantum fluid, which can be extracted by mapping the exciton-polariton model to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation [13] for the phase. Recent works suggest that the 2D KPZ behavior could be observed in the OPO in a narrow pump-strength range in the middle of the quasiordered phase [16,29]. Note, that analytical estimates for the vortex-vortex interactions in this problem exist only for the isotropic case [30] allowing only approximate analysis.…”

“…Recently, the BKT physics has been theoretically investigated in lattices of nonequilibrium photon condensates [12]. Finally, the presence of further qualitative corrections to the standard BKT picture introduced by higher-order phase fluctuations treated within the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang framework [13] has been proposed [14][15][16].…”