Generation and modulation of shock waves in two-dimensional polariton condensates

Due to the ability of exciton-polariton condensates formed in semiconductor microcavities to be achieved at room temperature and their characteristics such as non-equilibrium and strong interactions, they have become an ideal platform for studying the nonlinear properties of non-equilibrium quantum systems. In 2013, the research group led by L. Dominici observed two-dimensional symmetric shock waves in the polariton condensate driven by coherent pump. However, owing to the characteristics of this system, theoretical researches have lagged behind. In one-dimensional polariton condensates, disregarding cross-interaction of the system, a type of asymmetric shock wave was respectively discovered by A. M. Kamchatnov in 2012 and A. M. Belounis in 2017. In 2023, utilizing the adiabatic approximation, our research team not only uncovered sparse wave, symmetric, and asymmetric shock waves in the system, but also revealed that the symmetric shock waves are triggered by cross-interaction. At present, there is no theoretical research on shock waves in two-dimensional polariton condensate. In this paper, spectral methods and fourth-order Runge-Kutta methods are used to explore the generation and control of shock waves in two-dimensional polariton condensates. It is found that when the cross-interaction between the condensate and the polariton thermal reservoir is quenched at high condensation rates, the initially prepared bright solitons can be modulated into two types of rotationally symmetric shock waves with different velocities, while the initial dark-like solitons can only transform into a single velocity rotationally symmetric shock wave. If quenching the external potential, the dark-like solitons can be transformed into anisotropic supersonic shock waves, and the dependence of shock wave on the width of the external potential is also shown. When the external potential and incoherent pumping are controlled at low condensation rates, multiple anisotropic shock waves can be excited in a uniform condensate, and their amplitudes can be used to control the wave number and amplitude of the shock waves and the range of widths for the external potential or incoherent pumping to excite shock waves is also demonstrated. The proposed methods in this paper not only provide theoretical guidance for the generation and control of shock waves in exciton-polariton condensates, but also find symmetric shock waves similar to experiments (<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9993"><i>Nat. Commun.</i> <b>6</b> , 8993</ext-link>) without adopting any approximation, and open up a universal pathway for exciting shock waves in non-equilibrium or non-integrable systems, which may become a paradigm for transforming solitons into shock waves and significantly propel the rapid development of shock wave theory in different domains.