Liquid Light with a Whirl

Abstract

We develop a theory of artificial gauge fields in photon fluids for the cases of both second-order and third-order optical nonlinearities. This applies to weak excitations in the presence of pump fields carrying orbital angular momentum and is thus a type of Bogoliubov theory. The resulting artificial gauge fields experienced by the weak excitations are an interesting generalization of previous cases and reflect the PT-symmetry properties of the underlying non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We illustrate the observable consequences of the resulting synthetic magnetic fields for examples involving both second-order and third-order nonlinearities.