Exciton-polaritons in semiconductor microcavities have been studied intensely, both with respect to their intriguing fundamental physical properties and with respect to their potential in novel device designs. The latter requires ways to control polaritonic systems, and all-optical control mechanisms are considered to be especially useful. In this talk, we discuss and review our efforts to control the polariton density, utilizing optical four-wave mixing instabilites, and the spin or polarization textures resulting from the optical spin Hall effect. Both effects are readily observable in the cavity’s far-field emission, and hence potentially useful for optoelectronic and spinoptronic device applications.
In this paper, we present a polariton description of a semiconductor double microcavity system. The polariton formalism is derived from a microscopic theory for the exciton fields inside the quantum wells coupled to the confined optical cavity fields in a double cavity system. The polariton picture helps simplify theoretical studies of the observed phenomena in the double cavity system, such as nonlinear optical spin Hall effect.
Semiconductor microcavities offer a unique way to combine transient all-optical manipulation of GaAs quantum wells with the benefits of structural advantages of microcavities. In these systems, exciton-polaritons have dispersion relations with very small effective masses. This has enabled prominent effects, for example polaritonic Bose condensation, but it can also be exploited for the design of all-optical communication devices. The latter involves non-equilibrium phase transitions in the spatial arrangement of exciton-polaritons. We consider the case of optical pumping with normal incidence, yielding a spatially homogeneous distribution of exciton-polaritons in optical cavities containing the quantum wells. Exciton-exciton interactions can trigger instabilities if certain threshold behavior requirements are met. Such instabilities can lead, for example, to the spontaneous formation of hexagonal polariton lattices (corresponding to six-spot patterns in the far field), or to rolls (corresponding to two-spot far field patterns). The competition among these patterns can be controlled to a certain degree by applying control beams. In this paper, we summarize the theory of pattern formation and election in microcavities and illustrate the switching between patterns via simulation results.
Transverse patterns in polariton fluids were recently studied as promising candidates for all-optical low-intensity switching. Here, we demonstrate these patterns in a specifically designed double-cavity system. We theoretically and experimentally analyse their formation and optical control. Our detailed theoretical analysis of the coupled nonlinear dynamics of the optical fields inside the double-cavity and the excitonic excitations inside the embedded semiconductor quantum wells is firmly based on a microscopic many-particle theory. Our calculations in the time domain enable us to study both the ultrafast transient dynamics of the patterns and their steady-state behavior under stationary excitation conditions. The patterns we report and analyze go beyond what can be observed and understood in a simple scalar quantum field. We find that polarization-selective excitation of the polaritons leads to a complex interplay between longitudinal-transverse splitting of the cavity modes and the spin-dependent interactions of the polaritons' excitonic component.
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