Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
The generation of a quantum fluid of dressed photons at room temperature is experimentally demonstrated in an InGaN microcavity which is divided into two-and one-dimensional sections, resulting in single- and switchable multilevel coherent light emission. Ultra-low-threshold operation is attributed to the slight but robust excitonic fraction of the photonic condensate representing a bosonic laser working below the Mott transition (polariton laser). In contrast to equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensates, the nonequilibrium driven-dissipative nature enables the population of higher orbitals if any confinement potential is present to induce enhanced quantum correlations. Trapping inside microwire spacers leads to a polariton harmonic oscillator resulting in discrete states in an equidistant ladder of photonic orbitals. Level occupation and selection of a specific wave function is managed via optical control, mimicking a quantum emitter on a macroscopic level. It shows that exotic states of matter can be realized in rather simple structures at room temperature directly visible to the human eye. It represents also an excellent opportunity to study basic many-body dynamics in one-dimensional bosonic matter by simultaneously settling an optimized fabrication technique for devices enabling practical Boolean quantum logic gates for optical computing.