An international research team led by Alexander Kuznetsov at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics (PDI) in Berlin has demonstrated a fundamentally new way to control the condensation of hybrid light-matter particles. Using coherent acoustic driving to dynamically reshape the energy landscape of a semiconductor microcavity, the researchers achieved deterministic steering of a macroscopic quantum state into its lowest energy configuration.

The results, published in Nature Photonics, establish a strategy for engineering nonequilibrium quantum states and open prospects for ultrafast, tunable photonic technologies.

In collaboration with long-term partners from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council CONICET and the Bariloche Atomic Center and Balseiro Institute in Argentina, the team experimentally realized a universal scheme for selectively transferring populations within a multilevel quantum system using strong time periodic modulation.