Microcavity polaritons are a hybrid photonic system arising from the strong coupling of confined photons to quantum-well excitons. Due to their light-matter nature, polaritons inherit a Kerr-like nonlinearity while being easily accessible by standard optical means. The ability to engineer confinement potentials in microcavities makes polaritons a very convenient system to study spatially localized bosonic populations in for example 0D dots, 1D chains, 2D lattices. A good example of this is the polariton Josephson junction which consists of two localized polariton populations coupled via tunneling. Careful engineering of this system is predicted to induce Gaussian squeezing, a phenomenon that lies at a heart of the so-called unconventional photon blockade associated with single photon emission. We reveal a manifestation of the predicted squeezing by measuring the ultrafast time-dependent second-order correlation function g(2)(0). The light emitted by the microcavity oscillates between Poissonian and super-Poissonian in phase with the Josephson dynamics. This behavior is remarkably well explained by quantum simulations, which predict a dynamical evolution of the squeezing parameters. Beyond this, we study in depth the dephasing mechanisms of the polariton populations and are beginning to explore a wide range of artificial structures.
room 1.02, Pasteura 5 at 12:15

Piotr Deuar (IF PAN)
Classical-field calculations are a mainstay of simulations of the dynamics and stationary properties of ultracold atomic and polariton gases at nonzero temperature. They allow for temperatures too high to treat with other methods, strong fluctuations and defects, open systems, as well as the study of single experimental realisations and distribution functions. They do however omit any quantum fluctuations.We have derived an extended version of the stochastic GPE (SGPE) that preserves quantum fluctuations. So far, for the case of ultracold Bose gases. Thus, a very tractable, nonlinear description of the system has been obtained that also includes quantum fluctuations, depletion, shot noise, antibunching, and similar effects, and makes no assumptions of a condensate. In contrast to the usual ``truncated Wigner'' approach of adding virtual vacuum noise into the initial conditions, this method preserves quantum fluctuations even into the long-time stationary state.I will first describe the stochastic GPE model for an ultracold gas that allows for a stable but classical wave field description of the system with a set temperature, before presenting the newly derived extended version and briefly speculating about further generalisations.
room 1.02, Pasteura 5 at 12:15

Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron (Department of Theoretical Physics, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology)
During this talk I will present an idea of modeling opinion dynamics and show what could be the source of phase transitions in such a models from the perspective of social psychology. Then I will present one of the most interesting models of binary opinions, the q-voter model, and discuss phase transitions that are observed within this model. Finally, I will show what kind of questions, inspired by social theories and experiments, can be asked within the model.