Suppression of superfluidity by dissipation

Adrian Del Maestro, Bernd Rosenow

Mikhail Yurievich Kovalevsky, Н. М. Лавріненко, S. V. Peletminskiǐ +1 more

G. Keijsers, Torben Ham, Z. Geng +3 more

Superfluidity—frictionless flow—has been observed in various physical systems such as liquid helium, cold atoms, and exciton polaritons. Superfluidity is usually realized by cooling and suppressing all dissipation. Here we challenge this paradigm by demonstrating signatures of superfluidity, enabled by dissipation, in the flow of light within a room-temperature oil-filled cavity. Dissipation in the oil mediates effective photon-photon interactions which are noninstantaneous and nonlocal. Such interactions were expected to severely limit the emergence of superfluidity in conservative photonic systems. Surprisingly, when launching a photon fluid with sufficiently high density and low velocity against an obstacle in our driven-dissipative cavity, we observe a record suppression of backscattering. Our experiments also reveal the reorganization dynamics of photons into a nonscattering steady state and a qualitatively changing behavior of the optical phase as light propagates around the obstacle. The phase is locked between the laser and the obstacle but evolves with the intensity in the wake of the obstacle where the density of the photon fluid and its mean-field interaction energy decrease. Using a generalized Gross–Pitaevskii equation for photons coupled to a thermal field, we model our experiments and elucidate how the noninstantaneous and nonlocal character of interactions influences the suppression of scattering associated with superfluidity. Beyond providing the first signatures of cavity photon superfluidity, and of any superfluid both at room temperature and in steady state, our results pave the way for probing photon hydrodynamics in arbitrary potential landscapes using structured mirrors. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Lei Tan, Ke Liu, Chun-Hai Lv +1 more

The features of superfluid-Mott insulator phase transition in the array of dissipative cavities is analyzed. Employing a kind of quasi-boson and a mean-filed approach, we show analytically how dissipation and decoherence influence the critical behaviors and the time evolution of the system. We find that there is a localized tendency, which could lead to the break of superfluidity for a superfluid state and suppress the appearance of the long-range order form a Mott state. Eventually, a collection of mixture states localized on each site will arise.

A Correspondent

Arko Roy, Kush Saha

Abstract Motivated by the recent experiments on engineering localized losses in quantum gases, we study the dynamics of interacting bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice with local dissipation. Together with the Gutzwiller mean-field theory for density matrices and Lindblad master equation, we show how the onsite interaction between bosons affects the particle loss for various strengths of dissipation. For moderate dissipation, the trend in particle loss differs significantly near the superfluid-Mott boundary than the deep superfluid regime. While the loss is suppressed for stronger dissipation in the deep superfluid regime, revealing the typical quantum Zeno effect, the loss near the phase boundary shows non-monotonic dependence on the dissipation strength. We furthermore show that close to the phase boundary, the long-time dissipative dynamics is different from the deep superfluid regime. Thus the loss of particle due to dissipation may act as a probe to differentiate strongly-correlated superfluid regime from its weakly-correlated counterpart.