We study non-equilibrium polariton superfluids in the optical parametric oscillator (OPO) regime using a two-component Gross-Pitaevskii equation with pumping and decay. We identify a regime above OPO threshold, where the system undergoes spontaneous symmetry breaking and is unstable towards vortex formation without any driving rotation. Stable vortex solutions differ from metastable ones; the latter can persist in OPO superfluids but can only be triggered externally. Both spontaneous and triggered vortices are characterised by a generalised healing length, specified by the OPO parameters only.
We study, both theoretically and experimentally, the occurrence of topological defects in polariton superfluids in the optical parametric oscillator (OPO) regime. We explain in terms of local supercurrents the deterministic behaviour of both onset and dynamics of spontaneous vortex-antivortex pairs generated by perturbing the system with a pulsed probe. Using a generalised Gross-Pitaevskii equation, including photonic disorder, pumping and decay, we elucidate the reason why topological defects form in couples and can be detected by direct visualizations in multi-shot OPO experiments.
The experimental investigation of spontaneously created vortices is of utmost importance for the understanding of quantum phase transitions towards a superfluid phase, especially for two dimensional systems that are expected to be governed by the Berezinski-Kosterlitz-Thouless physics. By means of time resolved near-field interferometry we track the path of such vortices, created at random locations in an exciton-polariton condensate under pulsed non-resonant excitation, to their final pinning positions imposed by the stationary disorder. We formulate a theoretical model that successfully reproduces the experimental observations.
We generalize the spin Meissner effect for exciton-polariton condensate confined in annular geometries to the case of non-trivial topology of the condensate wavefunction. In contrast to the conventional spin Meissner state, topological spin Meissner states can in principle be observed at arbitrary high magnetic field not limited by the critical magnetic field value for the condensate in a simply-connected geometry. One special example of the topological Meissner states are half-vortices. We show that in the absence of magnetic field half-vortices in a ring exist in a form of superposition of elementary half-vortex states which resolves recent experimental results where such puzzling superposition was observed. Furthermore, we show that if a pure half-vortex state is to be observed, a non-zero magnetic field of a specific magnitude needs to be applied. Studying exciton-polariton in a ring in presence of TE-TM splitting, we observe spin Meissner states which break rotational symmetry of the system by developing inhomogeneous density distributions. We classify various states arising in presence of non-zero TE-TM splitting based on what states they can be continued from by increasing the TE-TM splitting parameter from zero. With further increasing TE-TM splitting, states with broken symmetry may transform into stable half-dark solitons and therefore may serve as a useful tool to generate various non-trivial states of a spinor condensate.
We compute the orbital angular momentum $L_z$ of an s-wave paired superfluid in the presence of an axisymmetric multiply quantized vortex. For vortices with winding number $|k| > 1$, we find that in the weak-pairing BCS regime $L_z$ is significantly reduced from its value $hbar N k/2$ in the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regime, where $N$ is the total number of fermions. This deviation results from the presence of unpaired fermions in the BCS ground state, which arise as a consequence of spectral flow along the vortex sub-gap states. We support our results analytically and numerically by solving the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes equations within the weak-pairing BCS regime.
We study driven-dissipative Bose-Einstein condensates in a two-mode Josephson system, such as a double-well potential, with asymmetrical pumping. We investigate nonlinear effects on the condensate populations and mode transitions. The generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equations are modified in order to treat pumping of only a single mode. We characterize the steady-state solutions in such a system as well as criteria for potential trapping of a condensate mode. There are many possible steady-states, with different density and/or phase profiles. Transitions between different condensate modes can be induced by varying the parameters of the junction or the initial conditions, or by applying external fields.