Absorption, photoluminescence, and resonant Rayleigh scattering probes of condensed microcavity polaritons

We investigate and compare different optical probes of a condensed state of microcavity polaritons in expected experimental conditions of nonresonant pumping. We show that the energy- and momentum-resolved resonant Rayleigh signal provides a distinctive probe of condensation as compared to, e.g., photoluminescence emission. In particular, the presence of a collective sound mode both above and below the chemical potential can be observed, as well as features directly related to the density of states of particle-hole-like excitations. Both resonant Rayleigh response and the absorption and photoluminescence are affected by the presence of quantum well disorder, which introduces a distribution of oscillator strengths between quantum well excitons at a given energy and cavity photons at a given momentum. As we show, this distribution makes it important that in the condensed regime, scattering by disorder is taken into account to all orders. We show that, in the low-density linear limit, this approach correctly describes inhomogeneous broadening of polaritons. In addition, in this limit, we extract a linear blueshift of the lower polariton versus density, with a coefficient determined by temperature and by a characteristic disorder length.