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 ten years, 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, including oscillation of a polariton condensate in a one-dimensional ring trap, and polariton drag, in which electrons directly push photons in a wire.

Department of Physics and Astronomy General Colloquia

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• David W. Snoke (2019), "Superfluids of Light: Bose-Einstein Condensation of Polaritons," https://nanohub.org/resources/29502.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. Bose-Einstein condensate
2. nanophotonics
3. Photons
4. polaritons
5. superfluidity