Phase domain walls in coherently driven Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We consider coherent states of weakly interacting bosons under the conditions of external resonant excitation, with a focus on a two-dimensional polariton fluid driven by a plane electromagnetic wave near the ground state. The coherent driving breaks the U(1) symmetry explicitly, which prevents the occurrence of quantum vortices in a uniform scalar condensate. Surprisingly, a spinor (two-component) system of the same kind admits topological excitations, such as domain walls of relative phase or confined half-vortex molecules, typical of a freely evolving spinor Bose system. Opposite-phase domains arise from the spontaneous breakdown of the spin symmetry $(\mathbb{Z}_2)$. Domain walls form with time even when the initial state of the system is uniform or completely disordered; they fall into different topological types distinguished by the total phase variation in the transverse direction. One type of domain walls is similar to ``magnetic'' solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates and exhibits nonzero spin polarization whose sign depends on the direction of motion. Domain walls of the second type, by contrast, behave like monopoles with broken spatiotemporal symmetry and tend to move in certain preferred directions. The interaction of vortices and domain walls results in a long-range ordering of the system.