No Arabic abstract
Analogue gravity enables the study of fields on curved spacetimes in the laboratory. There are numerous experimental platforms in which amplification at the event horizon or the ergoregion has been observed. Here, we demonstrate how optically generating a defect in a polariton microcavity enables the creation of one- and two-dimensional, transsonic fluid flows. We show that this highly tuneable method permits the creation of sonic horizons. Furthermore, we present a rotating geometry akin to the water-wave bathtub vortex. These experiments usher-in the possibility of observing stimulated as well as spontaneous amplification by the Hawking, Penrose and Zeldovich effects in fluids of light.
We consider two concentric rings formed by bosonic condensates of exciton-polaritons. A circular superfluid flow of polaritons in one of the rings can be manipulated by acting upon the second annular polariton condensate. The complex coupling between the rings with different topological charges triggers nucleation of stable Josephson vortices (JVs) which are revealed as topological defects of the angular dependence of the relative phase between rings. Being dependent on the coupling strength, the structure of the JV governs the difference of the mean angular momenta of the inner and the outer rings. At the vanishing coupling the condensates rotate independently demonstrating no correlations of their winding numbers. At the moderate coupling, the interaction between two condensates tends to equalize their mean angular momenta despite of the mismatch of the winding numbers demonstrating the phenomenology of a drag effect. Above the critical coupling strength the synchronous rotation is established via the phase slip events.
We study exciton-polariton nonlinear optical fluids in a high momentum regime for the first time. Defects in the fluid develop into dark solitons whose healing length decreases with increasing density. We deduce interaction constants for continuous wave polaritons an order of magnitude larger than with picosecond pulses. Time dependent measurements show a 100ps time for the buildup of the interaction strength suggesting a self-generated excitonic reservoir as the source of the extra nonlinearity. The experimental results agree well with a model of coupled photons, excitons and the reservoir.
We theoretically investigate how the presence of a reservoir of incoherent excitations affects the superfluidity properties of resonantly driven polariton fluids. While in the absence of reservoir the two cases of a defect moving in a fluid at rest and of a fluid flowing against a static defect are linked by a formal Galilean transformation, here the reservoir defines a privileged reference frame attached to the semiconductor structure and causes markedly different features between the two settings. The consequences on the critical velocity for superfluidity are highlighted and compared to experiments in resonantly driven excitons polaritons.
Atomtronics is an emerging field which aims to manipulate ultracold atom moving in matter wave circuits for both fundamental studies in quantum science and technological applications. In this colloquium, we review recent progress in matter-wave circuitry and atomtronics-based quantum technology. After a short introduction to the basic physical principles and the key experimental techniques needed to realize atomtronic systems, we describe the physics of matter-wave in simple circuits such as ring traps and two-terminal systems. The main experimental observations and outstanding questions are discussed. Applications to a broad range of quantum technologies, from quantum sensing with atom interferometry to future quantum simulation and quantum computation architectures, are then presented.
We develop a theory of artificial gauge fields in photon fluids for the cases of both second-order and third-order optical nonlinearities. This applies to weak excitations in the presence of pump fields carrying orbital angular momentum, and is thus a type of Bogoliubov theory. The resulting artificial gauge fields experienced by the weak excitations are an interesting generalization of previous cases and reflect the PT-symmetry properties of the underlying non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We illustrate the observable consequences of the resulting synthetic magnetic fields for examples involving both second-order and third-order nonlinearities.