Abstract

The fascination of macroscopic quantum coherence formed in a degenerate Bose gas drives the worldwide work on atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. Semiconductor polaritons¹ are another promising system to explore the physics of degenerate Bose gases in a stronger interaction regime. It is also a system easily produced and probed through optical methods. In this work we present the first observation of the onset of a quantum coherence formed out of an initially thermal population of polaritons in a microcavity quantum well system. The quantum coherence is measured by a time domain second order coherence g⁽²⁾(0) of the light emitted from the polaritons. Second and higher order coherence functions are crucial in quantum optics to distinguish among various pure states of light, such as coherent state or squeezed state, from classical thermal light². They have been measured indirectly in the spatial domain for atomic BECs^3,4. In our system, with supporting evidence from measurements of the input-output, dispersion, and time evolution of the emission, the phase transition was identified by a decrease of g⁽²⁾(0) ≈2, the value for a thermal state, toward g⁽²⁾(0) ≈1 for a coherent state. This is a direct evidence of the formation of a macroscopic quantum coherence in the lower polariton ground state.

© 2002 Optical Society of America