Title: "Crescent states in charge-imbalanced polariton condensates"
Abstract: Polariton condensation is a well-established phenomenon featuring all the signatures of an ordinary condensate. However, in the context of polariton condensation, almost exclusively balanced systems, with equal densities of electrons and holes, have been studied. This misses a whole class of potential exotic imbalanced condensed states like an FFLO or a breached-pair state.
Inspired by pioneering works on imbalanced electron-hole systems in TMDC monolayers strongly coupled to a cavity photon, using variational mean-field theory, we explore whether a combination of strong matter-light coupling and electric field biasing promotes novel condensed states, which do not exist otherwise.
It turns out that on top of a balanced polariton and a dark imbalanced FFLO condensates, the system hosts a variety of exotic condensed states. Most notably, at moderate charge imbalance, we identify a new state with spontaneously broken time-reversal and rotational symmetry, and unpaired carriers that occupy an anisotropic crescent-shaped sliver of momentum space. The crescent state stability results from long-range Coulomb interaction in combination with extremely long-range photon-mediated interaction.