Searching for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang phase in microcavity polaritons

Abstract

Recent approximate analytical work has suggested that, at certain values of the external pump, the optical parametric oscillator (OPO) regime of microcavity polaritons may provide a long sought realisation of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) physics in 2D. Here, by solving the full microscopic model numerically using the truncated Wigner method, we prove that this predicted KPZ phase for OPO is robust against the appearance of vortices or other effects. For those pump strengths, spatial correlations in the direction perpendicular to the pump, and the distribution of phase fluctuations, match closely to the forms characteristic of the KPZ universality. This strongly indicates the viability of observing KPZ behaviour in future polariton OPO experiments.