Quantum treatment of the Bose-Einstein condensation in nonequilibrium systems

Abstract

We develop a fully quantum-mechanical approach, based on stochastic trajectories, for an incoherently pumped system of interacting bosons in contact with a thermal reservoir. It enables a complete characterization of coherence in such a multimode system. We apply our model to microcavity exciton polaritons interacting with acoustic phonons and observe the formation of a macroscopic occupation in the lowest-energy mode accompanied by the simultaneous establishment of temporal and spatial coherence. We describe the transition from thermal to coherent statistics together with the expected emergence of an off-diagonal long-range order. © 2015 American Physical Society.