Abstract
The combination of high exciton-binding energy and large coupling strength makes exciton-polaritons in wide bandgap semiconductor microcavities (MCs) eminently suitable to promote quantum effects up to ambient conditions. In this respect, the III-nitride material system is a very promising candidate owing to the recent observation of room temperature (RT) polariton condensation, which should even benefit further from rapid developments in the areas of growth and processing. This chapter deals with GaN-based planar MCs where the phase transition of exciton-polaritons to an out-of-equilibrium macroscopic quantum state has been demonstrated up to 340 K. A comprehensive study of the threshold of the polariton condensation phase transition as a function of temperature and detuning evidences the interplay between carrier kinetics and thermodynamics. It turns out that polariton relaxation is predominantly driven by thermodynamics at RT. The evolution of the order parameter, i.e., the wavefunction of the polariton condensate, can thus be confronted to Bose-Einstein theory. In particular, it is expected that spontaneous symmetry breaking leads to the observation of randomly-oriented linearly polarized light as the condensate acquires a different phase for each realization. This behavior is evidenced for the case of a bulk but not for a quantum-well based GaN MC as the dimensionality of the system is affecting the spin dependence of the polariton-polariton interactions. In particular, in the case of a two-dimensional system, interactions between polaritons with parallel and opposite spins are no longer equivalent causing the self-induced Larmor precession of the polariton pseudospin. This feature is evidenced by the progressive depinning of the order parameter above the polariton condensation threshold.
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- 1.
Ω VRS corresponds to the minimum mode splitting between the lower and the upper polariton branch (LPB and UPB, respectively) for zero detuning between cavity-photon and exciton eigenenergies.
- 2.
Note that this criterion sets an arbitrary frontier and the excitonic fraction at k ∥=0 corresponds to 15 % for δ/Ω VRS=−1 and 85 % for δ/Ω VRS=1. For |δ|/Ω VRS=2, these ratios still amount to 5 and 95 %, respectively.
- 3.
This is true if one discards extra relaxation channels such as the LO-phonon assisted one [77].
- 4.
This simple picture is valid for zincblende semiconductors such as GaAs or CdTe. In wurtzite compounds, the crystal-field and spin-orbit splitting lift the valence-band degeneracy at the Γ point: the A-exciton is equivalent to the heavy hole but B and C are mixed [81].
- 5.
This discussion is generally valid for any in-plane momentum k ∥. However, throughout the following discussion we only consider the pseudospin of the condensate.
- 6.
Note that GaN is a uniaxial anisotropic material. However, for the c-plane structure investigated here the optical axis coincides with the surface normal and therefore no in-plane anisotropy is expected.
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Acknowledgements
G. Malpuech and D. Solnyshkov on the one hand and A.V. Kavokin, D. Read and Y.G. Rubo on the other hand are gratefully acknowledged for their respective theoretical investigation of the condensation phase diagram and the polarization properties of polariton condensates in III-nitride microcavities. The authors further wish to thank M. Glauser for careful proofreading. This work was supported by the NCCR Quantum Photonics, research instrument of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), by the SNSF (Grant No. 200020-113542) and by the EU-project Clermont4 (Grant No. FP7-235114).
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Levrat, J., Rossbach, G., Butté, R., Grandjean, N. (2013). Toward Quantum Fluids at Room Temperature: Polariton Condensation in III-Nitride Based Microcavities. In: Bramati, A., Modugno, M. (eds) Physics of Quantum Fluids. Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences, vol 177. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37569-9_10
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