Tim Byrnes

High-energy side-peak emission of exciton-polariton condensates in high density regime

In a standard semiconductor laser, electrons and holes recombine via stimulated emission to emit coherent light, in a process that is far from thermal equilibrium. Exciton-polariton condensates–sharing the same basic device structure as a semiconductor laser, consisting of quantum wells coupled to a microcavity–have been investigated primarily at densities far below the Mott density for signatures of Bose-Einstein condensation. At high densities approaching the Mott density, exciton-polariton condensates are generally thought to revert to a standard semiconductor laser, with the loss of strong coupling. Here, we report the observation of a photoluminescence sideband at high densities that cannot be accounted for by conventional semiconductor lasing. This also differs from an upper-polariton peak by the observation of the excitation power dependence in the peak-energy separation. Our interpretation as a persistent coherent electron-hole-photon coupling captures several features of this sideband, although a complete understanding of the experimental data is lacking. A full understanding of the observations should lead to a development in non-equilibrium many-body physics.

Entanglement in multimode bosonic systems

Entanglement generation between atomic ensembles is typically modeled using the framework of continuous variables (CV) which approximates discrete spin operators as canonical position and momentum operators. Although hugely successful with many applications, this approximation is valid only for small deviations in spin. Here we investigate entanglement generation between two atomic ensemble qubits using a measurement based scheme of a common light mode. Various methods of entanglement detection of the entangled state is discussed. We propose a entanglement witness for this state and discuss its further applications to optical states.