2002/04/12 by M. H. Szymańska, M. H. Szymanska, P. B. Littlewood · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #cond-mat #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s0038-1098(02)00453-2
published as Solid State Commun. 124, 103 (2002)
arxiv created 2002/04/12 · openalex publication_date 2002/10/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study a model of a photon mode dipole-coupled to a medium of two-level oscillators in a microcavity in the presence of dephasing processes introduced by coupling to external baths. Decoherence processes can be classified as pair-breaking or non-pair-breaking in analogy with magnetic or non-magnetic impurities in superconductors. In the absence of dephasing, the ground state of the model is a polariton condensate with a gap in the excitation spectrum. Increase of the pair-breaking parameter γ reduces the gap, which becomes zero at a critical value γC1; for large γ, the conventional laser regime is obtained in a way that demonstrates its close analogy to a gapless superconductor. In contrast, weak non-pair-breaking processes have no qualitative effect on the condensate or the existence of a gap, although they lead to inhomogeneous broadening of the excitations.