3 research outputs found
Polariton Pattern Formation and Photon Statistics of the Associated Emission
We report on the formation of a diverse family of transverse spatial polygon patterns in a microcavity
polariton fluid under coherent driving by a blue-detuned pump. Patterns emerge spontaneously
as a result of energy-degenerate polariton-polariton scattering from the pump state to interfering
high order vortex and antivortex modes, breaking azimuthal symmetry. The interplay between a
multimode parametric instability and intrinsic optical bistability leads to a sharp spike in the value
of second order coherence g (2)(0) of the emitted light, which we attribute to the strongly superlinear
kinetics of the underlying scattering processes driving the formation of patterns. We show numerically
by means of a linear stability analysis how the growth of parametric instabilities in our system
can lead to spontaneous symmetry breaking, predicting the formation and competition of different
pattern states in good agreement with experimental observations