Paraxial propagation of light in a nonlinear Kerr medium is mathematically analogous to temporal evolution of a quantum fluid with contact-type interactions. To establish this mapping, one should think of the beam’s axial coordinate as an effective time of a fluid composed of interacting photons [1]. My former group uses hot Rubidium vapor cells to produce such fluids of light [2]. I will introduce the control knobs of this platform to tune the Kerr-type interaction and show its intrinsically nonequilibrium nature due to an interaction quench at the entrance window of the cell. I will present three aspects of the fluid’s nonequilibrium dynamics that I explored during my PhD. The first one is the realization of an initial state with a strong localized density perturbation, leading to non-linear hydrodynamics in form of blast waves [3]. Second one is the measurement of pre-thermalization via the spatial coherence for a weakly disturbed fluid [4]. Finally, the measurement of density power spectrum, revealing correlations between the modes with opposite momenta, resulting from the interaction quenches and analogous to the acoustic peaks stemming from the cosmological particle production in cosmology [5].

[1]  Q. Fontaine, T. Bienaimé, E. Giacobino, A. Bramati, Q. Glorieux, Observation of the Bogoliubov Dispersion in a Fluid of Light, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, (2018)

[2]  Pierre-Élie Larré, I. Carusotto, Propagation of a quantum fluid of light in a cavityless nonlinear optical medium: General theory and response to quantum quenches, Phys. Rev. A 92, 043802, (2015)

[3]  M. Abuzarli, T. Bienaimé, E. Giacobino, A. Bramati, Q. Glorieux, Blast waves in a paraxial fluid of light, Europhysics Letters, Volume 134, Number 2, (2021)

[4]  M. Abuzarli, N. Cherroret, T. Bienaimé, Q. Glorieux, Nonequilibrium Prethermal States in a Two-Dimensional Photon Fluid, Phys. Rev. Lett.129, 100602, (2022)

[5]  J. Steinhauer, M. Abuzarli, T. Aladjidi, T. Bienaimé, C. Piekarski, W. Liu, E. Giacobino, A. Bramati, Q. Glorieux, Analogue cosmological particle creation in an ultracold quantum fluid of light, Nature Communications 13, 2890 (2022)

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5081440931

Meeting ID: 508 144 0931

Seminar hosts: Juraj Krsnik i Borna Radatović