  The magnetic field effect on phase transitions in electrically neutral
bosonic systems is much less studied than those in fermionic systems, such as
superconducting or ferromagnetic phase transitions. Nevertheless, composite
bosons are strongly sensitive to magnetic fields: both their internal structure
and motion as whole particles may be affected. A joint effort of ten
laboratories has been focused on studies of polariton lasers, where
non-equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensates of bosonic quasiparticles,
exciton-polaritons, may appear or disappear under an effect of applied magnetic
fields. Polariton lasers based on pillar or planar microcavities were excited
both optically and electrically. In all cases a pronounced dependence of the
onset to lasing on the magnetic field has been observed. For the sake of
comparison, photon lasing (lasing by an electron-hole plasma) in the presence
of a magnetic field has been studied on the same samples as polariton lasing.
The threshold to photon lasing is essentially governed by the excitonic Mott
transition which appears to be sensitive to magnetic fields too. All the
observed experimental features are qualitatively described within a uniform
model based on coupled diffusion equations for electrons, holes and excitons
and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for exciton-polariton condensates. Our
research sheds more light on the physics of non-equilibrium Bose-Einstein
condensates and the results manifest high potentiality of polariton lasers for
spin-based quantum logic applications.
