Optomechanical signature of a frictionless flow of superfluid light

Abstract

We propose an experimental setup that should make it possible to reveal the frictionless flow of a superfluid of light from the suppression of the drag force that it exerts onto a material obstacle. In the paraxial-propagation geometry considered here, the photon-fluid dynamics is described by a wave equation analogous to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation of dilute Bose-Einstein condensates and the obstacle consists in a solid dielectric slab immersed into a nonlinear optical liquid. By means of an ab initio calculation of the electromagnetic force experienced by the obstacle, we anticipate that superfluidity is detectable in state-of-the-art experiments from the disappearance of the optomechanical deformation of the obstacle.

10 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Critical velocity for superfluid flow across the BEC-BCS crossover
• Superfluid Motion of Light
• Drag in a resonantly driven polariton fluid

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Experimental observation of turbulent coherent structures in a superfluid of light
• Critical velocity of a two-dimensional superflow past a potential barrier of arbitrary penetrability
• Artificial gauge fields in the t-z mapping for optical pulses: spatio-temporal wavepacket control and quantum Hall physics
• Critical velocity for superfluidity in the one-dimensional mean-field regime: From matter to light quantum fluids
• Paraxial fluid of light in hot atomic vapors
• Critical speed of a binary superfluid of light