Cilibrizzi, Pasquale and Sigurdsson, Helgi and Liew, Timothy and Ohadi, Hamid and Askitopoulos, Alexis and Brodbeck, Sebastian and Schneider, Christian and Shelykh, Ivan and Hofling, Sven and Ruostekoski, Janne and Lagoudakis, Pavlos (2016) Half-skyrmion spin textures in polariton microcavities. Physical review B, 94 (4). ISSN 1550-235X
Skyrmion_Spin_textures_PC3.pdf - Accepted Version
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Abstract
We study the polarization dynamics of a spatially expanding polariton condensate under nonresonant linearly polarized optical excitation. The spatially and temporally resolved polariton emission reveals the formation of non-trivial spin textures in the form of a quadruplet polarization pattern both in the linear and circular Stokes parameters, and an octuplet in the diagonal Stokes parameter. The continuous rotation of the polariton pseudospin vector through the condensate due to TE-TM splitting exhibits an ordered pattern of half-skyrmions associated with a half-integer topological number. A theoretical model based on a driven-dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation coupled with an exciton reservoir describes the dynamics of the nontrivial spin textures through the optical spin-Hall effect.