Kinetic theory of non-equilibrium condensation of microcavity polaritons

Abstract

We develop a kinetic theory of microcavity polaritons in presence of both Coulomb and polariton-phonon interaction, obeying particle number conservation. We study the growth of a macroscopic population of condensed particles in the lowest polariton state, under steady-state incoherent excitation of higher energy states. The collective excitation spectrum, resulting from the Coulomb Hamiltonian treated within the Hartree-Fock-Bogolubov framework, strongly influences the polariton condensation kinetics. In particular, for values of the excitation intensity above the condensation threshold, scattering from the condensate into the collective excitation modes results in strong quantum fluctuations that deplete the condensate. A numerical evaluation based on a few-level scheme shows that the condensate fraction is expected to be lower than 1 even far above threshold. With increasing system size, the role of the polariton quantum fluctuations becomes dominant, eventually preventing condensation to occur for system size larger than 100 micron.