Nature Paper on Polariton Lasers

by Valentina Giangreco M. Puletti 4 Jul 2013 Physics
Published in the "Nordic News" section of Nordita News issue 2, 2013

Ivan Shelykh, professor at the University of Iceland and member of the Nordita board, and his PhD student Ivan Savenko, are co-authors of an article published in Nature, with the title "An electrically pumped polariton laser", based on an international collaboration involving also experimentalists from Würtzburg, Stanford, Moscow, and Tokyo.

The basic mechanism behind the "polariton laser" is that strongly coupled exciton-polaritons (excitations mixing light and matter), as those in quantum well micro-cavity, can dynamically condensate by stimulated polariton scatterings, and consequently decay by the leakage of photons from the micro-cavity, emitting coherent and monocromatic light.

Coherent polariton emissions have been previously realized in optically pumped semiconductor micro-cavities. However, here for the first time, the authors realize an electrically pumped polariton laser, which is more relevant for technical applications, as well as more energy-efficient compared to conventional semiconductor lasers.