Accepted Wednesday Aug 05, 2009
In the last decade, a two-dimensional matter-light system called the microcavity exciton-polariton has emerged as a new, promising candidate of Bose Einstein Condensation (BEC) in solids. Many pieces of important evidence of polariton BEC have been established very recently in GaAs and CdTe microcavities at the liquid Helium temperature, opening a door to rich manybody physics inaccessible in experiments before. Technology progress also made polariton BEC at room temperatures promising. In parallel with experimental progresses, theory and numerical simulations are developed, and our understanding of the system has greatly advanced. In this article, we review those recent experiments and corresponding theoretical pictures based on Gross-Pitaevskii equations and Boltzmann kinetics simulations for a finite size BEC of polaritons.