Steady-state superfluidity of light in a tunable cavity at room temperature
arXiv:2012.13463
Abstract
Light in a nonlinear cavity is expected to flow without friction -- like a superfluid -- under certain conditions. Until now, part-light part-matter (i.e., polariton) superfluids have been observed either at liquid helium temperatures in steady state, or at room temperature for sub-picosecond timescales. Here we report signatures of superfluid cavity photons (not polaritons) for the first time. When launching a photon fluid against a defect, we observe a suppression of backscattering above a critical intensity and below a critical velocity. Room-temperature and steady-state photon superfluidity emerges thanks to the strong thermo-optical nonlinearity of our oil-filled cavity. Numerical simulations qualitatively reproduce our experimental observations, and reveal how a viscous photon fluid reorganizes into a superfluid within the thermal relaxation time of the oil. Our results establish thermo-optical nonlinear cavities as platforms for probing photon superfluidity at room temperature, and offer perspectives for exploring superfluidity in arbitrary potential landscapes using structured mirrors.
arXiv comment8 pages, 4 figures
References in corpus (13)
- Quantum fluids of light
- Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
- Quantised Vortices in an Exciton-Polariton Fluid
- Evidence for a critical velocity in a Bose-Einstein condensed gas
- Observation of Superfluid Flow in a Bose-Einstein Condensed Gas
- Dispersive, superfluid-like shock waves in nonlinear optics
- Stochastic properties of systems controlled by autocatalytic reactions II
- Superfluid behaviour of a two-dimensional Bose gas
- Bogoliubov dispersion relation and the possibility of superfluidity for weakly-interacting photons in a 2D photon fluid
- Observation of the Bogoliubov dispersion relation in a fluid of light
- Superfluid light in propagating geometries
- The role of geometry in the superfluid flow of nonlocal photon fluids
- Non-Markovian Stochastic Resonance of Light in a Microcavity