Abstract

Exciton-polaritons arise from the strong coherent coupling of excitons to cavity photons in a semiconductor microcavity. Due to the Coulomb interaction between excitons, the polaritons possess a strong optical nonlinearity [1]. Excitons with spin +1 or −1 can be excited optically by left and right circularly polarized photons, respectively. In this contribution we study the formation of 2D polariton patterns coherently driven by a linearly polarized pump beam. Special emphasis is placed on the spontaneous symmetry breaking between the two spin components. The appropriate dimensionless mean-field model for excitons Ψ^± strongly coupled to cavity photons E^± reads as [1,2]

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