Statistics of the polariton condensate

The influence of polariton-polariton scattering on the statistics of the polariton condensate in a non-resonantly excited semiconductor quantum well embedded in a CdTe semiconductor microcavity is discussed. Taking advantage of the existence of a bottleneck in the polariton dispersion curve, the polariton states are separated into two domains: reservoir polaritons inside the bottleneck and active polaritons with wave vector q whose energy lies below the bottleneck. In the framework of the master equation formalism, the non-equilibrium stationary reduced density matrix is calculated and the statistics of polaritons in the condensate at q=0 is determined. The anomalous correlations between the polaritons in the condensate and those with wave vectors q, -q leads to an enhancement of the noise in the condensate. As a consequence, the second order correlation function of the condensate does not show the full coherence that is characteristic of laser emission.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figure

Mixing of the Averaging process and its discrete dual on finite-dimensional geometries

We analyze the $L^1$-mixing of a generalization of the Averaging process introduced by Aldous. The process takes place on a growing sequence of graphs which we assume to be finite-dimensional, in the sense that the random walk on those geometries satisfies a family of Nash inequalities. As a byproduct of our analysis, we provide a complete picture of the total variation mixing of a discrete dual of the Averaging process, which we call Binomial Splitting process. A single particle of this process is essentially the random walk on the underlying graph. When several particles evolve together, they interact by synchronizing their jumps when placed on neighboring sites. We show that, given $k$ the number of particles and $n$ the (growing) size of the underlying graph, the system exhibits cutoff in total variation if $k\to\infty$ and $k=O(n^2)$. Finally, we exploit the duality between the two processes to show that the Binomial Splitting satisfies a version of Aldous' spectral gap identity, namely, the relaxation time of the process is independent of the number of particles.Comment: 30 pages. Typos fixe