Talk
Friday, May 06th, 2011
- Speaker
- Konstantinos G. Lagoudakis
- Affiliation
- Institute of Condensed Matter Physics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
- Title
- Disorder and non equilibrium effects in exciton polariton condensates
- Location
- Department of Physics Bldg., Voutes, 3rd floor Seminar Room
- Time
- 16:00
- Language
- English
- Abstract
-
Microcavity exciton-polaritons are bosonic quasi-particles with a half-light half-matter nature that occur from the strong coupling between quantum well excitons and cavity photons in semiconductor microcavities. Because of their half-light nature they are four orders of magnitude lighter than the free electrons and can undergo condensation even in temperatures achievable by cryogenic means.
The achievement of polariton condensation has triggered a great interest in the scientific community because of the rich physics of this system and the simplicity of the experimental realization. The short lifetimes of polaritons, renders the condensates far out of equilibrium and in the same time allows us to probe their behavior and properties from the emitted luminescence.
Disorder that is acquired during growth is a serious issue that is usually regarded as a problem rather than an advantage. In this talk, the combination of disorder and non equilibrium is shown to be the source of exciting phenomenologies rather than a drawback. The effects that will be addressed are vorticity and its dynamics as well as the observation of Josephson oscillations in polariton condensates.