Superfluids of light

Monday, July 22, 2019 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

David Snoke University of Pittsburgh

It is possible to engineer the properties of photons in an optical medium to have an effective mass and repulsive interactions so that they act like a gas of atoms. These "renormalized photons" are called polaritons. In the past decade, several experiments have demonstrated many of the canonical effects of Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity of polaritons.

In this talk I will review some of this past work and present recent results with polaritons that have very long lifetimes, including movies of equilibration and damped oscillations of a condensate.