Spontaneous symmetry breaking in coherently driven-dissipative coupled nanocavities

Bruno Garbin

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is a fundamentally important process that underlies many outstanding physical phenomena. In particular, SSB has been observed in optics in single coherently driven micro or macro ring resonators, where it occurs between the two counter-propagative or polarization waves, respectively, and it has been proposed for new computing schemes. Nanodevices are highly promising and SSB has been observed in evanescently coupled nanolasers as the breaking of the mirror (or left/right) symmetry. However, incoherent pumping suffers from limitations (e.g. thermal). In addition, most theoretical developments on few photon SSB in nonlinear coupled cavities have been carried out in a coherently driven-dissipative framework and have notably predicted important quantum features such as entanglement. Here, we report on the first experimental realization of spontaneous symmetry breaking in coherently-driven dissipative coupled nanocavities.