Persistent currents of superfluidic light in a four-level coherent atomic medium

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the superfluidic properties of light propagating in a four-level coherent atomic medium. The model is derived under the paraxial approximation in the form of a generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation and features spatially controllable and quantum-enhanced optical properties, which can offer new possibilities in the field of optical analogue systems. In particular, we use this versatility to study the dynamics of an optical vortex beam confined in a nontrivial connected geometry, finding numerical evidence of another superfluidic signature analogue: the persistent current of light.

Quantum Optics in Dense Atomic Media: From Optical Memories to Fluids of Light

“…We can note an interesting proposal to observe a similar mechanism in photon fluid proposed in Ref. [91].…”

Wave-kinetic approach to the Schrödinger–Newton equation

“…The interest of the SN equation is that it suggests the possible use of laboratory tests of quantum gravity, which include search for the existence of equilibrium quantum states and study of the dispersion properties of the elementary excitations. A bridge with present day experiments using cold atoms [8], Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) [9] and superfluidity of light [10][11][12] can eventually be explored. Simulation of gravitational phenomena and SN effects using nonlinear optics have in fact been recently discussed [13,14].…”

Using numerical methods from nonlocal optics to simulate the dynamics of N -body systems in alternative theories of gravity

“…All the solvers were written in C++ and the GPGPU implementation with an hardware-neutral approach was done through the Ar-rayFire library [24]. The implementation was initially tested, and the works [9,16] already published based on these solvers assures its physical correctness. After performing the required adaptations to solve equation (15), we tested the solver performance when running with different hardware platforms, GPUs and CPUs, as well as with different Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (integrated with the Arrayfire), namely CUDA and OpenCL.…”

“…Indeed, the Schrödinger-Newton model is capable of describing a much wider set of systems, ranging from boson stars [10] to dark matter [11] and superfluidity [9,15], to name a few, and due to the similarities between these mathematical descriptions, this system has been proposed and used for implementing optical analogues [9][10][11]15], where systems that are hard or even impossible to study are emulated in the laboratory under controlled conditions. Over the years, many numerical models have been developed and improved to simulate this class of systems and in the last years, at our research group, we have developed a set of high-performance solvers based on GPGPU supercomputing to numerically study this class of systems, and successfully applied them in the study of superfluidity in nematic liquid crystals [9] and persistent currents in atomic gases [16]. Due to generality of our implementation, these solvers can be applied to other systems and in this work we explore how they can be used to study these alternatives to gravity.…”