Drag in a resonantly driven polariton fluid

Abstract

We study the linear response of a coherently driven polariton fluid in the pump-only configuration scattering against a point-like defect and evaluate analytically the drag force exerted by the fluid on the defect. When the system is excited near the bottom of the lower polariton dispersion, the sign of the interaction-renormalised pump detuning classifies the collective excitation spectra in three different categories [C. Ciuti and I. Carusotto, physica status solidi (b) 242, 2224 (2005)]: linear for zero, diffusive-like for positive, and gapped for negative detuning. We show that both cases of zero and positive detuning share a qualitatively similar crossover of the drag force from the subsonic to the supersonic regime as a function of the fluid velocity, with a critical velocity given by the speed of sound found for the linear regime. In contrast, for gapped spectra, we find that the critical velocity exceeds the speed of sound. In all cases, the residual drag force in the subcritical regime depends on the polariton lifetime only. Also, well below the critical velocity, the drag force varies linearly with the polariton lifetime, in agreement with previous work [E. Cancellieri et al., Phys. Rev. B 82, 224512 (2010)], where the drag was determined numerically for a finite-size defect.

7 pages, 2 figures

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• Galilean boosts and superfluidity of resonantly driven polariton fluids in the presence of an incoherent reservoir
• Polarization hydrodynamics in a one-dimensional polariton condensate
• Critical velocity for superfluidity in the one-dimensional mean-field regime: From matter to light quantum fluids
• Beyond superfluidity in driven non-equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensates
• Engineering Gaussian states of light from a planar microcavity
• Probing the collective excitations of a spinor polariton fluid