Sustained propagation and control of topological excitations in polariton superfluid

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to sustain and control topological excitations in polariton superfluids by compensating for losses with a weak support field, enabling extended propagation and new hydrodynamic behaviors.

Contribution

It presents a novel optical bistability-based approach to extend polariton superfluid propagation and manipulate topological excitations, revealing behaviors beyond standard hydrodynamics.

Findings

Extended polariton superfluid propagation using a weak support field

Control of vortices and dark solitons through optical bistability

Identification of new hydrodynamic behaviors in driven-dissipative fluids

Abstract

We present a simple method to compensate for losses in a polariton superfluid. Based on a weak support field, it allows for an extended propagation of a resonantly driven polariton superfluid at a minimal energetic cost. Moreover, this setup based on optical bistability, leads to a significant release of the phase constraint imposed by the resonant driving. This release, together with the macroscopic polariton propagation, offers a unique opportunity to study the hydrodynamics of topological excitations of polariton superfluids such as quantized vortices and dark solitons. We numerically study how the coherent field supporting the superfluid flow interacts with the vortices and how it can be used to control them. Interestingly, we show that standard hydrodynamics does not apply for this driven-dissipative fluid and new behaviours are identified.