Superfluidity of polaritons in semiconductor microcavities
By A. Amo, J. Lefrère, S. Pigeon, C. Adrados, C. Ciuti, I. Carusotto, R. Houdré, Elisabeth Giacobino, A. Bramati. 2008
875 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Similar to atoms in cold gases, exciton–polaritons in semiconductor microcavities can undergo Bose–Einstein condensation. A striking consequence of the appearance of macroscopic coherence in these systems is superfluidity. Now, clear evidence for such behaviour has been found in an exciton–polariton condensate. Superfluidity, the ability of a quantum fluid to flow without friction, is one of the most spectacular phenomena occurring in degenerate gases of interacting bosons. Since its first discovery in liquid helium-4 (refs 1, 2), superfluidity has been observed in quite different systems, and recent experiments with ultracold trapped atoms have explored the subtle links between superfluidity and Bose–Einstein condensation3,4,5. In solid-state systems, it has been anticipated that exciton–polaritons in semiconductor microcavities should behave as an unusual quantum fluid6,7,8, with unique properties stemming from its intrinsically non-equilibrium nature. This has stimulated the quest for an experimental demonstration of superfluidity effects in polariton systems9,10,11,12,13. Here, we report clear evidence for superfluid motion of polaritons. Superfluidity is investigated in terms of the Landau criterion and manifests itself as the suppression of scattering from defects when the flow velocity is slower than the speed of sound in the fluid. Moreover, a Cerenkov-like wake pattern is observed when the flow velocity exceeds the speed of sound. The experimental findings are in quantitative agreement with predictions based on a generalized Gross–Pitaevskii theory12,13, and establish microcavity polaritons as a system for exploring the rich physics of non-equilibrium quantum fluids.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Civil and Structural Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d47c0a72d700889a519f3a6ae0d049dc8227be0
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- C. Weitenberg
- A. Amo
- A. Kavokin
- M. Skolnick
- Elisabeth Giacobino
- Jacqueline Bloch
- Daniele Sanvitto
- Lorenzo Marrucci
In Civil and Structural Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “They behave as bosonic quasi-particles that can arrange under appropriate pumping into a Bose–Einstein condensate [107–109] exhibiting superfluid behavior [112,113] and solitonic/vortex excitations [114–119].”
- Exciton-polaritons in lattices: A non-linear photonic simulator (2016, background): “Under intense pumping, polariton– polariton interactions dominate over kinetic energy, resulting in phenomena like optical parametric oscillation [34,35], squeezing [36,37], bistability [38], multistability [39,40], superfluidity [41], hydrodynamic vortices [42,43], and dark and bright solitons [44–”
- Persistent currents and quantized vortices in a polariton superfluid (2009, background): “A different scenario characterizes coherent resonant injection of parametrically pumped polariton condensates, which have recently been shown to exhibit a new form of non-equilibrium superfluid behaviou”