Geometric frustration in polygons of polariton condensates creating vortices of varying topological charge

Cookson, Tamsin, Kalinin, Kirill, Sigurdsson, Helgi, Töpfer, Julian D., Alyatkin, Sergey, Silva, Matteo, Langbein, Wolfgang ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9786-1023, Berloff, Natalia G. and Lagoudakis, Pavlos G. 2021. Geometric frustration in polygons of polariton condensates creating vortices of varying topological charge. Nature Communications 12 , 2120. 10.1038/s41467-021-22121-3

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	Nature Research
ISSN:	2041-1723
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 July 2021
Date of Acceptance:	25 February 2021
Last Modified:	03 May 2023 10:34
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/142992

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