Mode-locked waveguide polariton laser

We introduce a novel mode-locking scheme based on polariton-polariton interactions. We demonstrate its operation, up to room temperature in a 60µm-long GaN-based waveguide cavity emitting in the blue/near-ultraviolet range. The exciton-polariton active layer acts both as a gain medium and as a self-focusing medium with a large Kerr-like non-linearity. The monitoring of the cavity free spectral range across the lasing threshold evidences the linearization of the non-linear mode dispersion due to self-phase modulation. The Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the coupled exciton and photon fields taking into account the exact cavity geometry, predicts the appearance of optical pulses within the cavity that correspond to optical solitons. Pulses widths are about 100 fs, both in theory and experiment.