Mass-anisotropy driven stripe pattern formation and directional modulational instability in polariton condensate

Abstract

Motivated by recent experimental advances toward electrical control of the effective mass and the realization of anisotropic mass distributions, we investigate the impact of mass anisotropy on driven-dissipative polariton condensates, focusing on modulational instability, pattern formation, and the collective dynamics of the emergent patterns. We show that unequal effective masses along the two orthogonal directions induce stripe pattern formation in an exciton-polariton condensate pumped by a non-resonant Gaussian laser beam above a critical mass ratio. A Bogoliubov analysis of the homogeneously pumped system reveals that mass anisotropy leaves the modulational-instability criteria unchanged but reshapes the unstable-mode dispersion by reducing the most unstable wave- length along the direction of larger effective mass with increasing mass ratio. This introduces an anisotropy-controlled length scale for pattern selection. When the pump width becomes comparable to the most unstable wavelength, the condensate becomes modulationally unstable and develops stripe patterns along the direction of larger effective mass, accompanied by particle-number fluctua- tions and center-of-mass oscillations along the same direction. As the pump width increases further, the stripes become distorted and develop spatial irregularities during the time evolution, indicative of modulational instability. Nevertheless, the anisotropic mass distribution preserves a pronounced directional preference, in contrast to the fully disordered patterns observed in the isotropic-mass case. Our results identify mass anisotropy as a key control parameter for directional modulational instability and pattern formation in nonequilibrium polariton condensates.