The Future Prospects of Room-Temperature Polariton Lasers

Ultrafast spin-polarized lasing in a highly photoexcited semiconductor microcavity at room temperature

“…We now distinguish the present room-temperature system from exciton-polariton condensates at cryogenic temperatures [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. A laser is typically characterized by its coherence and spectral properties, whereas a macroscopic condensate exhibits unique energy and momentum distributions.…”

“…The spin-polarized lasing is attributed to a spin-dependent stimulated process of correlated electron-hole pairs formed near the Fermi edge in a high-density electron-hole plasma coupled to the cavity light. The spin-polarized laser studied here has a structure similar to vertical-cavity surfaceemitting lasers (VCSELs) [15] and microcavities used for studies of exciton-polariton condensates [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In VCSELs, the lasing energy is typically determined by the bare cavity resonance and has limited energy shifts [25] and linewidth broadening [26] with increasing carrier density.…”