Role of geometry in the superfluid flow of nonlocal photon fluids

Year: 2016

Authors: Vocke D., Wilson K., Marino F., Carusotto I., Wright E.M., Roger T., Anderson B.P., Ohberg P., Faccio D.

Autors Affiliation: Heriot Watt Univ, Inst Photon & Quantum Sci, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, Midlothian, Scotland; CNR, Ist Nazl Ott, Largo E Fermi 6, I-50125 Florence, Italy; Ist Nazl Fis Nucl, Sez Firenze, Via Sansone 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, FI, Italy; Univ Trento, INO CNR BEC Ctr, I-38123 Povo, Italy; Univ Trento, Dipartimento Fis, I-38123 Povo, Italy; Univ Arizona, Coll Opt Sci, Tucson, AZ 85721 USA.

Abstract: Recent work has unveiled a new class of optical systems that can exhibit the characteristic features of superfluidity. One such system relies on the repulsive photon-photon interaction that is mediated by a thermal optical nonlinearity and is therefore inherently nonlocal due to thermal diffusion. Here we investigate how such a nonlocal interaction, which at a first inspection would not be expected to lead to superfluid behavior, may be tailored by acting upon the geometry of the photon fluid itself. Our models and measurements show that restricting the laser profile and hence the photon fluid to a strongly elliptical geometry modifies thermal diffusion along the major beam axis and reduces the effective nonlocal interaction length by two orders of magnitude. This in turn enables the system to display a characteristic trait of superfluid flow: the nucleation of quantized vortices in the flow past an extended physical obstacle. These results are general and apply to other nonlocal fluids, such as dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, and show that “thermal” photon superfluids provide an exciting and novel experimental environment for probing the nature of superfluidity, with applications to the study of quantum turbulence and analog gravity.

Journal/Review: PHYSICAL REVIEW A

Volume: 94 (1)      Pages from: 013849-1  to: 013849-9

More Information: D.F. acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC GA 306559 and EPSRC (UK, Grant No. EP/J00443X/1). I.C. acknowledges financial support by the ERC through the QGBE grant, by the EU-FET Proactive grant AQuS, Project No. 640800, and by the Autonomous Province of Trento, partly through the SiQuro project (“On Silicon Chip Quantum Optics for Quantum Computing and Secure Communications”).
KeyWords: shock-waves; media; vortices; condensate; transition; dispersion; turbulence; solitons; laser; model
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.94.013849

ImpactFactor: 2.925
Citations: 47
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