2017/10/31 by Tamsin Cookson, Kirill Kalinin, Helgi Sigurdsson +6 · 30 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Polariton #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Superfluidity #Topological defect #Topological quantum number #Topology (electrical circuits) #Vortex #Vorticity #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22121-3
published in Nature Communications 12(1), 2120 (Nature Portfolio)
openalex created_date 2021/02/15 · openalex publication_date 2021/04/09 · arxiv created 2021/06/09 · arxiv updated 2021/06/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Vorticity is a key ingredient to a broad variety of fluid phenomena, and its quantised version is considered to be the hallmark of superfluidity. Circulating flows that correspond to vortices of a large topological charge, termed giant vortices, are notoriously difficult to realise and even when externally imprinted, they are unstable, breaking into many vortices of a single charge. In spite of many theoretical proposals on the formation and stabilisation of giant vortices in ultra-cold atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and other superfluid systems, their experimental realisation remains elusive. Polariton condensates stand out from other superfluid systems due to their particularly strong interparticle interactions combined with their non-equilibrium nature, and as such provide an alternative testbed for the study of vortices. Here, we non-resonantly excite an odd number of polariton condensates at the vertices of a regular polygon and we observe the formation of a stable discrete vortex state with a large topological charge as a consequence of antibonding frustration between nearest neighbouring condensates.