Exciton polaritons in a planar quantum well excited by a normally incident resonant light wave have been considered. Due to the nonlinearity caused by interparticle interactions, the optical response of a laterally homogeneous polariton system is bistable. It has been found that additional stability branches, characterized by different field distributions, can arise even in an effectively spinless system in the case where polariton motion in the quantum well plane is bounded by potential barriers. Fast and well controlled transitions between these branches are possible upon varying the frequency or amplitude of the incident wave. Such transitions have been experimentally demonstrated in a high- Q GaAs microcavity with a 60-μm square mesa.
Demenev et al. (Sun,) studied this question.