Optically Controlled Femtosecond Polariton Switch at Room Temperature
Fei Chen, Hui Li, Hang Zhou, Song Luo, Zheng Sun, Ziyu Ye, Fenghao Sun, Jiawei Wang, Yuanlin Zheng, Xianfeng Chen, Huailiang Xu, Hongxing Xu, Tim Byrnes, Zhanghai Chen, Jian Wu
Abstract
Exciton polaritons have shown great potential for applications such as low-threshold lasing, quantum simulation, and dissipation-free circuits. In this paper, we realize a room temperature ultrafast polaritonic switch where the Bose-Einstein condensate population can be depleted at the hundred femtosecond timescale with high extinction ratios. This is achieved by applying an ultrashort optical control pulse, inducing parametric scattering within the photon part of the polariton condensate via a four-wave mixing process. Using a femtosecond angle-resolved spectroscopic imaging technique, the erasure and revival of the polariton condensates can be visualized. The condensate depletion and revival are well modeled by an open-dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation including parametric scattering process. This pushes the speed frontier of all-optical controlled polaritonic switches at room temperature towards the THz regime.