Descripción del proyecto
Quantum fluids are an extraordinary category of physical systems where quantum nature reveal itself at a macroscopic level. Superconductivity, superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation are spectacular examples of macroscopic coherence effects in quantum fluids. Driven out-of-equilibrium, both classical and quantum fluids display turbulent behaviors. The main difference between the two is lying in the fact that quantum fluids possess an absence of viscosity, and the building blocks of turbulence phenomena, the elementary excitations named vortices, have to be quantized meaning that the phase circulation around their core has to be a multiple of 2pi. These two properties affect drastically the system's behaviors compared to the classical turbulent scenario where vortices are known to interact all together in a continuous manner and have the potential to redistribute the energy of the system at all scales.
These brought the questions of how vortices are nucleating, interacting, and recombining in the quantum fluid opening the field of quantum turbulence. How the primordial fluctuations associated with the quantum nature of the system can influence the aforementioned vortex properties? Is their spreading of entanglement mediated by interactions in a turbulent superfluid leading to squeezing states? Having insights into the previous questions would allow to understand what is the main implication of the difference between quantum turbulence and classical turbulence.
In this action, we propose to investigate these questions with a superfluid of light made of semiconductor microcavities. This system allows to realize full microscopic investigation of 2D vortex spatial distributions to unveil their statistics and their interacting/nucleating properties. Furthermore, by elaborating a new time sampling nonlinear detection we will evaluate spatiotemporal correlations spreading in the system with the potential to enter the deep quantum regime of quantum fluids.