Quantized vortices in an exciton–polariton condensate

By K. Lagoudakis, M. Wouters, M. Richard, A. Baas, I. Carusotto, R. André, D. L. S. Dang, B. Deveaud-Plédran. 2008

638 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When a superfluid—such as liquid helium—is set in rotation, vortices appear in which circulation around a closed loop can take only discrete values. Such quantized vortices have now been observed in a solid-state system—a Bose–Einstein condensate made of exciton polaritons. One of the most striking quantum effects in an interacting Bose gas at low temperature is superfluidity. First observed in liquid 4He, this phenomenon has been intensively studied in a variety of systems for its remarkable features such as the persistence of superflows and the proliferation of quantized vortices1. The achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases2 provided the opportunity to observe and study superfluidity in an extremely clean and well-controlled environment. In the solid state, Bose–Einstein condensation of exciton polaritons has been reported recently3,4,5,6. Polaritons are strongly interacting light–matter quasiparticles that occur naturally in semiconductor microcavities in the strong-coupling regime and constitute an interesting example of composite bosons. Here, we report the observation of spontaneous formation of pinned quantized vortices in the Bose-condensed phase of a polariton fluid. Theoretical insight into the possible origin of such vortices is presented in terms of a generalized Gross–Pitaevskii equation. Whereas the observation of quantized vortices is, in itself, not sufficient for establishing the superfluid nature of the non-equilibrium polariton condensate, it suggests parallels between our system and conventional superfluids.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef6ca354a272a1a0b6f5d9bd6c145ebc68b67588

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Polariton polarization-sensitive phenomena in planar semiconductor microcavities (2009, positive): “…of a linear dispersion of excited polariton states in the vicinity of the condensate (Utsunomiya et al 2008) and the formation of vortices (as in Lagoudakis et al (2008)) altogether would provide unambiguous evidence for the superfluid phase transition, provided that the experiments are done at…”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, positive): “They behave as bosonic quasi-particles that can arrange under appropriate pumping into a Bose-Einstein condensate [101,102,103] exhibiting superfluid behavior [106,107] and solitonic/vortex excitations [108,109,110,111,112,113].”
Observation of bright polariton solitons in a semiconductor microcavity (2011, background): “Recent discoveries made with microcavity polaritons include condensation [11, 12], vortices [13, 14], superfluidity [15] and follow a pathway similar to the one which led to the observation of coherent matter wave solitons [5, 6].”