Abstract
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 vortices. The achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases 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 now allows to plan for the observation of similar phenomenology. Polaritons are 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. In the second part of the chapter, we provide the clear observation of half vortices, special to spinor condensates. We then go no, in the last part of this chapter, to study the dynamics of spontaneously created vortices. We show that their path is determined by the disorder landscape towards their final stable position.
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Acknowledgements
This work is inspired from the PhD work of Konstantinos Lagoudakis who has carried most of the experiments reported here. It has been performed with the strong support of a group of very talented PhD student and postdocs, that I wish to congratulate warmly for their outstanding work: Stefan Kundermann, Francesco Manni, Verena Kohule, Barbara Pietka, Maxime Richard, Augustin Baas, and Yoan Léger. I also would like to convey my most sincere thanks to the theoreticians who allowed us to understand our results, by spending enough time with us and putting into simple words the results of their equations. In particular, Michiel Wouters, Vincenzo Savona, Alexei Kavokin and Yuri Rubo deserve very special acknowledgements. The work has been carried out within the framework of the Quantum Photonics National Center of Competence in research financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Complementary funding for conferences and meetings has been obtained through the Latsis Foundation, the Polatom network of the European Science Foundation and a King Saud University associate professorship.
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Deveaud-Plédran, B., Lagoudakis, K.G. (2012). Vortices in Spontaneous Bose–Einstein Condensates of Exciton–Polaritons. In: Timofeev, V., Sanvitto, D. (eds) Exciton Polaritons in Microcavities. Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences, vol 172. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24186-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24186-4_3
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