Room-temperature superfluidity in a polariton condensate

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Abstract

Superfluidity is a phenomenon usually restricted to cryogenic temperatures, but organic microcavities provide the conditions for a superfluid flow of polaritons at room temperature.

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Quantum fluids of light

Iacopo Carusotto, Cristiano Ciuti (2013)

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This article reviews recent theoretical and experimental advances in the fundamental understanding and active control of quantum fluids of light in nonlinear optical systems. In presence of effective photon-photon interactions induced by the optical nonlinearity of the medium, a many-photon system can behave collectively as a quantum fluid with a number of novel features stemming from its intrinsically non-equilibrium nature. We present a rich variety of photon hydrodynamical effects that have been recently observed, from the superfluid flow around a defect at low speeds, to the appearance of a Mach-Cherenkov cone in a supersonic flow, to the hydrodynamic formation of topological excitations such as quantized vortices and dark solitons at the surface of large impenetrable obstacles. While our review is mostly focused on a class of semiconductor systems that have been extensively studied in recent years (namely planar semiconductor microcavities in the strong light-matter coupling regime having cavity polaritons as elementary excitations), the very concept of quantum fluids of light applies to a broad spectrum of systems, ranging from bulk nonlinear crystals, to atomic clouds embedded in optical fibers and cavities, to photonic crystal cavities, to superconducting quantum circuits based on Josephson junctions. The conclusive part of our article is devoted to a review of the exciting perspectives to achieve strongly correlated photon gases. In particular, we present different mechanisms to obtain efficient photon blockade, we discuss the novel quantum phases that are expected to appear in arrays of strongly nonlinear cavities, and we point out the rich phenomenology offered by the implementation of artificial gauge fields for photons.

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Room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensation of cavity exciton-polaritons in a polymer.

Johannes Plumhof, Thilo Stöferle, Lijian Mai … (2014)

A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter in which extensive collective coherence leads to intriguing macroscopic quantum phenomena. In crystalline semiconductor microcavities, bosonic quasiparticles, known as exciton-polaritons, can be created through strong coupling between bound electron-hole pairs and the photon field. Recently, a non-equilibrium BEC (ref. ) and superfluidity have been demonstrated in such structures. With organic crystals grown inside dielectric microcavities, signatures of polariton lasing have been observed. However, owing to the deleterious effects of disorder and material imperfection on the condensed phase, only crystalline materials of the highest quality have been used until now. Here we demonstrate non-equilibrium BEC of exciton-polaritons in a polymer-filled microcavity at room temperature. We observe thermalization of polaritons and, above a critical excitation density, clear evidence of condensation at zero in-plane momentum, namely nonlinear behaviour, blueshifted emission and long-range coherence. The key signatures distinguishing the behaviour from conventional photon lasing are presented. As no crystal growth is involved, our approach radically reduces the complexity of experiments to investigate BEC physics and paves the way for a new generation of opto-electronic devices, taking advantage of the processability and flexibility of polymers.