No Arabic abstract
Systems with competing attractive and repulsive interactions have a tendency to condense into droplets. This is the case for water in a sink, liquid helium and dipolar atomic gases. Here, we consider a photon fluid which is formed in the transverse plane of a monochromatic laser beam propagating in an attractive (focusing) nonlocal nonlinear medium. In this setting we demonstrate the formation of the optical analogue of matter wave droplets, and study their properties. The system we consider admits droplets that carry orbital angular momentum. We find bound states possessing liquid-like properties, such as bulk pressure and compressibility. Interestingly, these droplets of light, as opposed to optical vortices, form due to the competition between long-range s-wave (monopole) and d-wave (quadrupole) interactions as well as diffraction.
Self-bound quantum droplets are a newly discovered phase in the context of ultracold atoms. In this work we report their experimental realization following the original proposal by Petrov [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 155302 (2015)], using an attractive bosonic mixture. In this system spherical droplets form due to the balance of competing attractive and repulsive forces, provided by the mean-field energy close to the collapse threshold and the first-order correction due to quantum fluctuations. Thanks to an optical levitating potential with negligible residual confinement we observe self-bound droplets in free space and we characterize the conditions for their formation as well as their equilibrium properties. This work sets the stage for future studies on quantum droplets, from the measurement of their peculiar excitation spectrum, to the exploration of their superfluid nature.
Self-bound many-body systems are formed through a balance of attractive and repulsive forces and occur in many physical scenarios. Liquid droplets are an example of a self-bound system, formed by a balance of the mutual attractive and repulsive forces that derive from different components of the inter-particle potential. It has been suggested that self-bound ensembles of ultracold atoms should exist for atom number densities that are 10^8 times lower than in a helium droplet, which is formed from a dense quantum liquid. However, such ensembles have been elusive up to now because they require forces other than the usual zero-range contact interaction, which is either attractive or repulsive but never both. On the basis of the recent finding that an unstable bosonic dipolar gas can be stabilized by a repulsive many-body term, it was predicted that three-dimensional self-bound quantum droplets of magnetic atoms should exist. Here we report the observation of such droplets in a trap-free levitation field. We find that this dilute magnetic quantum liquid requires a minimum, critical number of atoms, below which the liquid evaporates into an expanding gas as a result of the quantum pressure of the individual constituents. Consequently, around this critical atom number we observe an interaction-driven phase transition between a gas and a self-bound liquid in the quantum degenerate regime with ultracold atoms. These droplets are the dilute counterpart of strongly correlated self-bound systems such as atomic nuclei and helium droplets.
We present an optomechanical device designed to allow optical transduction of orbital angular momentum of light. An optically induced twist imparted on the device by light is detected using an integrated cavity optomechanical system based on a nanobeam slot-mode photonic crystal cavity. This device could allow measurement of the orbital angular momentum of light when photons are absorbed by the mechanical element, or detection of the presence of photons when they are scattered into new orbital angular momentum states by a sub-wavelength grating patterned on the device. Such a system allows detection of a $l = 1$ orbital angular momentum field with an average power of $3.9times10^3$ photons modulated at the mechanical resonance frequency of the device and can be extended to higher order orbital angular momentum states.
Manipulation of orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light is essential in OAM-based optical systems. Especially, OAM divider, which can convert the incoming OAM mode into one or several new smaller modes in proportion at different spatial paths, is very useful in OAM-based optical networks. However, this useful tool was never reported yet. For the first time, we put forward a passive OAM divider based on coordinate transformation. The device consists of a Cartesian to log-polar coordinate converter and an inverse converter. The first converter converts the OAM light into a rectangular-shaped plane light with a transverse phase gradient. And the second converter converts the plane light into multiple diffracted light. The OAM of zeroth-order diffracted light is the product of the input OAM and the scaling parameter. The residual light is output from other diffracted orders. Furthermore, we extend the scheme to realize equal N-dividing of OAM and arbitrary dividing of OAM. The ability of dividing OAM shows huge potential for OAM-based classical and quantum information processing.
Recently, exciton-polaritons in a semiconductor microcavity were found to condense into a coherent ground state much like a Bose-Einstein condensate and a superfluid. They have become a unique testbed for generating and manipulating quantum vortices in a driven-dissipative superfluid. Here, we generate exciton-polariton condensate with non-resonant Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) optical beam and verify the direct transfer of lights orbital angular momentum to exciton-polariton quantum fluid. Quantized vortices are found in spite of large energy relaxation involved in non-resonant pumping. We identified phase singularity, density distribution and energy eigenstates for the vortex states. Our observations confirm that non-resonant optical LG beam can be used to manipulate chirality, topological charge, and stability of non-equilibrium quantum fluid. These vortices are quite robust, only sensitive to the OAM of light and not other parameters such as energy, intensity, size or shape of the pump beam. Therefore, optical information can be transferred between photon and exciton-polariton with ease and the technique is potentially useful to form the controllable network of multiple topological charges even in the presence of spectral randomness in solid state system.