Spontaneous symmetry breaking in persistent currents of spinor polaritons

Abstract We predict the spontaneous symmetry breaking in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate of exciton-polaritons (polaritons) caused by the coupling of its spin and orbital degrees of freedom. We study a polariton condensate trapped in a ring-shaped effective potential with a broken rotational symme...

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Autores principales: Evgeny Sedov, Sergey Arakelian, Alexey Kavokin
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2021
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/7e7e32695d354b9ba7d82ea1ca8d11dc
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Sumario:Abstract We predict the spontaneous symmetry breaking in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate of exciton-polaritons (polaritons) caused by the coupling of its spin and orbital degrees of freedom. We study a polariton condensate trapped in a ring-shaped effective potential with a broken rotational symmetry. We propose a realistic scheme of generating controllable spinor azimuthal persistent currents of polaritons in the trap under the continuous wave optical pump. We propose a new type of half-quantum circulating states in a spinor system characterized by azimuthal currents in both circular polarizations and a vortex in only one of the polarizations. The spontaneous symmetry breaking in the spinor polariton condensate that consists in the switching from co-winding to opposite-winding currents in opposite spin states is revealed. It is characterized by the change of the average orbital angular momentum of the condensate from zero to non-zero values. The radial displacement of the pump spot and the polarization of the pump act as the control parameters. The considered system exhibits a fundamental similarity to a superconducting flux qubit, which makes it highly promising for applications in quantum computing.