Exciton-polaritons are the fundamental excitations arising from the strong coupling of quantum well excitons and cavity photons in semiconductor microcavities. They are compound bosons for which stimulated scattering and macroscopic occupation of single quantum states can occur at sufficiently high densities. One way of creating such polariton condensates is with nonresonant optical pumping. Doing so creates a large density of free- carriers and excitons that strongly interact and blueshift the polariton energy levels. Using spatially patterned nonresonant fields, the polariton potential landscape can be tailored and optically trapped condensates can be created. This thesis shows that the spin properties of polariton condensates are strongly modified by such trapping. Under linearly polarised pumping, helicity can spontaneously develop at a critical occupation, breaking the parity symmetry. This formation of spin-up/spin-down condensates is explained within a Gross-Pitaevskii model which accurately reproduces the influence of electric fields and condensate density. Under elliptically polarised pumping, two phenomena are observed: the formation of condensates with the opposite handedness to the pump and hysteresis of both occupation and spin with respect to pump power. The spatial dependence of these effects highlights the limitations of commonly used models of polariton condensation. Finally, the suitability of patterned optical fields for the creation of polariton lattices is explored. For small chains of condensates, controllable coupling between adjacent spins is demonstrated, with the formation of antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic domains. The extent of these domains is strongly affected by sample nonuniformity, fundamentally limiting the scalability of these lattices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:763669 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | del Valle-Inclán Redondo, Yago Baltasar |
| Contributors | Baumberg, Jeremy |
| Publisher | University of Cambridge |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/284554 |
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