All-optical triangular and honeycomb lattices of exciton–polaritons

Abstract

We implement an all-optically reconfigurable triangular lattice of exciton–polariton condensates in a III–V semiconductor microcavity. For this, we utilize a spatial light modulator to structure an incident nonresonant excitation laser beam into a corresponding triangular lattice of Gaussian beams that are focused onto the cavity plane. The optical excitation pattern locally stimulates and blueshifts polaritons due to exciton interactions. At a critical pump power, polaritons condense into a macroscopically coherent Bloch state with sharp Bragg peaks. We reconstruct the full band structure of the system through energy tomography techniques as a function of lattice constant, allowing us to resolve polaritonic Bloch bands from the condensate emission. While for sufficiently large lattice constants, one observes the formation of triangular arrays of condensates, for small lattice constant and pump powers above condensation threshold, one observes the formation of honeycomb, instead of triangular, lattice of condensates, with clear evidence of condensation into the S-band. Our results underpin the quality of all-optically engineered polariton lattices to simulate condensed matter systems in the strong coupling regime.