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Quantized vortices appear in quantum gases at the breakdown of superfluidity. In liquid helium and cold atomic gases, they have been indentified as the quantum counterpart of turbulence in classical fluids. In the solid state, composite light-matter bosons known as exciton polaritons have enabled studies of non-equilibrium quantum gases and superfluidity. However, there has been no experimental evidence of hydrodynamic nucleation of polariton vortices so far. Here we report the experimental study of a polariton fluid flowing past an obstacle and the observation of nucleation of quantized vortex pairs in the wake of the obstacle. We image the nucleation mechanism and track the motion of the vortices along the flow. The nucleation conditions are established in terms of local fluid density and velocity measured on the obstacle perimeter. The experimental results are successfully reproduced by numerical simulations based on the resolution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By means of an electron hole rate equation model we explain the phase dynamics of a quantum dot semiconductor optical amplifier and the appearance of different decay times observed in pump and probe experiments. The ultrafast hole relaxation leads to a first ultrafast recovery of the gain, followed by electron relaxation and, in the nanosecond timescale, radiative and non-radiative recombinations. The phase dynamics is slower and is affected by thermal redistribution of carriers within the dot. We explain the ultrafast response of quantum dot amplifiers as an effect of hole escape and recombination without the need to assume Auger processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the optical tomography of the probability density of quasiparticles, the microcavity polaritons, confined in three dimensions by cylindrical traps. Collecting the photoluminescence emitted by the quasimodes under continuous nonresonant laser excitation, we reconstruct a three-dimensional mapping of the photoluminescence, from which we can extract the spatial distribution of the confined states at any energy. We discuss the impact of the confinement geometry on the wave function patterns and give an intuitive understanding in terms of a light-matter quasiparticle confined in a box. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the author's view on the study by S. I. Tsintzos and colleagues concerning polaritons to workaday respectability. He remarks that the study have described how a gallium arsenide diode was produced that emits light directly from polariton states at temperatures of up to 235 kelvin, which is a breakthrough because polaritons can be stable only at very low temperatures and densities and tend to disintegrate, transforming themselves spontaneously into run-of-the-mill photons.

Spatio-time-resolved cathodoluminescence (STRCL) spectroscopy is implemented to assess the local carrier dynamics in a 70-nm-thick, very low threading dislocation (TD) density, pseudomorphic m-plane In0.05Ga0.95N epilayer grown on a freestanding GaN substrate by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy. Although TDs or stacking faults are absent, sub-micrometer-wide zonary patterns parallel to the c-axis and 2-µm-long-axis figure-of-8 patterns parallel to the a-axis are clearly visualized in the monochromatic cathodoluminescence intensity images. Because the STRCL measurement reveals very little spatial variation of low-temperature radiative lifetime, the considerable peak energy variation is interpreted to originate from nonidentical In-incorporation efficiency for the growing surfaces exhibiting various miscut angles. The figure-of-8 patterns are ascribed to originate from the anisotropic, severe m-plane tilt mosaic along the a-axis of the GaN substrate, and the zonary patterns may originate from the m-plane tilt mosaic along the c-axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]