Metamorphoses of the flow past an obstacle of a resonantly-driven bistable polariton fluid

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments, we theoretically analyze the flow past an obstacle of a one-dimensional "quantum fluid of light" which is resonantly driven, and exhibits bistability. The flow is found to abruptly change several times when the fluid velocity or the obstacle potential strength are increased. In contrast to the cases of usual fluids and superfluids, the transitions take place between stationary states. They involve the fluid bistability in an essential way. Remarkably, at the transitions points, the fluid in the obstacle wake lies in the unstable intermediate density state.

References in corpus (5)

• Quantum fluids of light
• Observation of Superfluidity of Polaritons in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Stationary and non-stationary fluid flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate through a penetrable barrier
• High-resolution coherent probe spectroscopy of a polariton quantum fluid
• Critical velocity in resonantly driven polariton superfluids

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Spectrum of collective excitations of a quantum fluid of polaritons