Fig. 1: Excitation schematic, Bloch modes, and stationary states in hexagons of polariton condensates. | Nature Communications

Fig. 1: Excitation schematic, Bloch modes, and stationary states in hexagons of polariton condensates.

From: Geometric frustration in polygons of polariton condensates creating vortices of varying topological charge

Fig. 1

a Schematic showing a quantum well microcavity. Non-resonant lasers (red cones) at normal incidence create polariton condensates at their respective locations. b, c Example of reduced Brillouin zone energies of angular Bloch modes (red dots) in an N = 5 and N = 6 polygon, respectively. Blue curves show band structure in the thermodynamic limit. d, j Experimental condensate photoluminescence in real-space and e, k Fourier space in a hexagon geometry, with radii R = 16.9 μm and R = 14.7 μm, showing in-phase and anti-phase locked condensates, respectively. f, l Corresponding experimentally extracted real-space polariton phase maps. g–i and m–o show simulations of the steady-state polariton condensate wavefunction Ψ(r, t) using the driven-dissipative Gross–Pitaevskii equation in the in-phase and anti-phase locked configuration, respectively. g, m Real-space density ∣Ψ(r)∣2, h, n Fourier-space density \(| \hat{{{\Psi }}}({\bf{k}}){| }^{2}\), and i, o phase \(\arg ({{\Psi }}({\bf{r}}))\). All real-space, Fourier-space, and phase images are plotted on the same scale defined on the scale bar at the bottom of each column.

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