Blowup dynamics of coherently driven polariton condensates

Based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equations, it is predicted that a repulsive interaction provides a way for a two-dimensional polariton condensate to accumulate energy in spite of dissipation under above-resonance optical pumping. The energy can be accumulated over a time much longer than the polariton lifetime, resulting in the state in which the blueshift of the polariton level compensates the mismatch of the pump frequency. The process starts when the field density reaches the parametric scattering threshold that is inversely proportional to the polariton lifetime. Although the increase in energy may be arbitrarily slow in the beginning, it is followed by a blowup. This scenario applies to the case of transitions between steady states in multistable cavity-polariton systems. There is a tradeoff between the latency of the transitions and the pump power.