Spontaneous formation of vortices and gray solitons in a spinor polariton fluid under coherent driving

Physical Review B: Condensed Matter and Materials Physics. 2020. Vol. 102. Article 104307.

S. S. Gavrilov

It is generally accepted that quantized vortices formed in coherent bosonic fluids are “excitations” and as such do not arise in a one-mode condensate at zero temperature. To excite them, one needs either inhomogeneities (impurities, rotation, etc.) or essentially finite fluctuations. Here, we predict a perfectly spontaneous formation of vortices even at zero temperature, which takes place in a homogeneous cavity-polariton system under one-mode optical excitation at normal incidence. In spite of the absence of equilibrium and U(1) invariance, this system shows a counterpart of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless crossover between single vortices and coupled vortex-antivortex states ranging from small dipoles to rectilinear filaments with long-range ordering.

Keywords: солитоны, solitons, экситонные поляритоны, quantized vortices, квантованные вихри, exciton polariton