Time Translation Symmetry Breaking in an Isolated Spin-Orbit-Coupled Fluid of Light

Abstract

We study the interplay between intrinsic spin-orbit coupling and nonlinear photon-photon interactions in a nonparaxial, elliptically polarized fluid of light propagating in a bulk Kerr medium. We find that in situations where the nonlinear interactions induce birefringence, i.e., a polarization-dependent nonlinear refractive index, their interplay with spin-orbit coupling results in an interference between the two polarization components of the fluid traveling at different wave vectors, which entails the breaking of translation symmetry along the propagation direction. This phenomenon leads to a Floquet band structure in the Bogoliubov spectrum of the fluid, and to characteristic oscillations of its intensity correlations. We characterize these oscillations in detail and point out their exponential growth at large propagation distances, revealing the presence of parametric resonances.

7 pages, 4 figures + Supplemental Material

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Spin and Density Modes in a Binary Fluid of Light
• Paraxial fluids of light
• Small-scale light structures in a Kerr medium
• Dynamical phase transition of light in time-varying nonlinear dispersive media
• Coarsening of binary Bose superfluids: an effective theory
• Critical speed of a binary superfluid of light
• Spatio-temporal equilibrium thermodynamics of guided optical waves at positive and negative temperatures