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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Thermalization and condensation in an incoherently pumped passive optical cavity

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International audience; We study theoretically and numerically the condensation and the thermalization of classical optical waves in an incoherently pumped passive Kerr cavity. We show that the dynamics of the cavity exhibits a turbulent behavior that can be described by the wave turbulence theory. A mean-field kinetic equation is derived, which reveals that, in its high finesse regime, the cavity behaves essentially as a conservative Hamiltonian system. In particular, the intracavity turbulent field is shown to relax adiabatically toward a thermodynamic equilibrium state of energy equipartition. As a consequence of this effect of wave thermalization, the incoherent optical field undergoes a process of condensation, characterized by the spontaneous emergence of a plane wave from the incoherently pumped cavity. The condensation process is an equilibrium phase transition that occurs below a critical value of the (kinetic) energy of the incoherent pump. In spite of the dissipative nature of the cavity dynamics, the condensate fraction of the high-finesse cavity field is found in quantitative agreement with the theory inherited from the purely conservative (Hamiltonian) nonlinear Schr¨odinger equation.