Experimental observation of turbulent coherent structures in a superfluid of light

Abstract

We experimentally explore the rich variety of nonlinear coherent structures arising in a turbulent flow of superfluid light past an obstacle in an all-optical configuration. The different hydrodynamic regimes observed are organised in a unique phase diagram involving the velocity of the flow and the diameter of the obstacle. Then, we focus on the vortices nucleated in the wake of the obstacle by investigating their intensity profile and the dependence of the radius of their core on the healing length. Our results pave the way for further investigations on turbulence in photon superfluids and provide versatile experimental tools for simulating quantum transport with nonlinear light.

References in corpus (12)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Quantised Vortices in an Exciton-Polariton Fluid
• Stationary and non-stationary fluid flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate through a penetrable barrier
• Hydrodynamic nucleation of vortices and solitons in a resonantly excited polariton superfluid
• Controlling the transverse instability of dark solitons and nucleation of vortices by a potential barrier
• Dipole Oscillations of a Bose-Einstein Condensate in Presence of Defects and Disorder
• Thermally Condensing Photons into a Coherently Split State of Light
• Nonlinear diffraction of light beams propagating in photorefractive media with embedded reflecting wire
• Optomechanical signature of a frictionless flow of superfluid light
• Superfluid Motion of Light
• Non-equilibrium Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in driven-dissipative condensates

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Hot atomic vapors for nonlinear and quantum optics
• Vortex creation, annihilation and nonlinear dynamics in atomic vapors
• Hamiltonian derivation of the point vortex model from the two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation
• Critical velocity for vortex nucleation and roton emission in a generalized model for superfluids
• Topological constraints on the dynamics of vortex formation in a two-dimensional quantum fluid
• Critical velocity of a two-dimensional superflow past a potential barrier of arbitrary penetrability
• Critical velocity for superfluidity in the one-dimensional mean-field regime: From matter to light quantum fluids
• Paraxial fluids of light
• Conformal-invariance of 2D quantum turbulence in an exciton-polariton fluid of light
• Topological Pathways to Two-Dimensional Quantum Turbulence
• Stationary transport above the critical velocity in a one-dimensional superflow past an obstacle
• Spatio-temporal equilibrium thermodynamics of guided optical waves at positive and negative temperatures
• Critical speed of a binary superfluid of light