On multicomponent polariton superfluidity in the optical parametric oscillator regime

Abstract

Superfluidity, the ability of a liquid or gas to flow with zero viscosity, is one of the most remarkable implications of collective quantum coherence. In equilibrium systems like liquid 4He and ultracold atomic gases, superfluid behaviour conjugates diverse yet related phenomena, such as persistency of metastable flow in multiply connected geometries and the existence of a critical velocity for frictionless flow when hitting a static defect. The link between these different aspects of superfluid behaviour is far less clear in driven-dissipative systems displaying collective coherence, such as microcavity polaritons, which raises important questions about their concurrency. With a joint theoretical and experimental study, we show that the scenario is particularly rich for polaritons driven in a three-fluid collective coherent regime so-called optical parametric oscillator. On the one hand, the spontaneous macroscopic coherence following the phase locking of the signal and idler fluids has been shown to be responsible for their simultaneous quantized flow metastability. On the other hand, we show here that pump, signal and idler have distinct responses when hitting a static defect; while the signal displays hardly appreciable modulations, the ones appearing in pump and idler are determined by their mutual coupling due to nonlinear and parametric processes.

paper (6 pages, 4 figures), Supplemental Material (6 pages, 7 figures)

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Quantum-fluid dynamics of microcavity polaritons
• Light Engineering of the Polariton Landscape in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Ultrafast control of Rabi oscillations in a polariton condensate
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Room-temperature superfluidity in a polariton condensate
• Coherently driven microcavity-polaritons and the question of superfluidity
• Superluminal X-waves in a polariton quantum fluid
• Keldysh field theory for nonequilibrium condensation in a parametrically pumped polariton system
• Properties of the signal mode in the polariton OPO regime
• PC-symmetry-protected edge states in interacting driven-dissipative bosonic systems
• Spontaneous patterns in coherently driven polariton microcavities