My research focuses on the remarkable properties of Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons created inside a III-V semiconductor microcavity. Polaritons are essentially photons dressed with an effective mass and strong interactions. These interacting photons can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation, which is a state of matter with spontaneous coherence. I am studying how a system of interacting photons can reach thermal equilibrium and how the degree of their interactions can affect their thermodynamic properties. This work connects to several fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, such as how coherence can occur spontaneously in Bose-Einstein condensates and how coherence is lost in standard quantum systems. This, in turn, relates to the deep question of why there is irreversibility in nature, that is, the arrow of time.
Alnatah, H., Comaron, P., Mukherjee, S., Beaumariage, J., Pfeiffer, L. N., West, K., ... & Szymańska, M. (2022). Critical fluctuations of mode-hopping in a confined, driven-dissipative quantum system. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.11445.
Yao, Q., Comaron, P., Alnatah, H. A., Beaumariage, J., Mukherjee, S., West, K., ... & Snoke, D. W. (2023). Persistent, controllable circulation of a polariton ring condensate. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.07803.
Sun, Z., Beaumariage, J., Wan, Q., Alnatah, H., Hougland, N., Chisholm, J., ... & Snoke, D. (2021). Charged Bosons Made of Fermions in Bilayer Structures with Strong Metallic Screening. Nano letters, 21(18), 7669- 7675.
