2014/10/01 by H. S. Nguyen, D. Gerace, I. Carusotto +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.quant-gas
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.114.036402
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 036402 (2015) · 5 pages Main + 5 pages Supplementary, 8 figures
arxiv created 2014/10/01 · arxiv updated 2016/08/10
We report an experimental study of superfluid hydrodynamic effects in a one-dimensional polariton fluid flowing along a laterally patterned semiconductor microcavity and hitting a micron-sized engineered defect. At high excitation power, superfluid propagation effects are observed in the polariton dynamics, in particular, a sharp acoustic horizon is formed at the defect position, separating regions of sub- and super-sonic flow. Our experimental findings are quantitatively reproduced by theoretical calculations based on a generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Promising perspectives to observe Hawking radiation via photon correlation measurements are illustrated.