Superfluids of light
IQOQI Quantum Seminar
Speaker: David SnokeWhen: Apr. 5 2023 09:00
Where: Erwin Schrödinger Saal
It is possible to engineer the properties of photons in an optical medium to have an effective mass and repulsive interactions, so that they act like a gas of atoms. These "renormalized photons" are called polaritons. In the past decade, several experiments have demonstrated many of the canonical effects of Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity of polaritons. In this talk I will review some of this past work and present recent results with polaritons that have very long lifetime, including our recent results on persistent circulation of a polariton condensate.
David Snoke is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. He studied physics as an undergrad at Cornell University, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990, working with James Wolfe on condensed matter spectroscopy. He was a postdoc and guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, working with Manuel Cardona, in the early 1990s, and came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2006, with the citation, "for his pioneering work on the experimental and theoretical understanding of dynamical optical processes in semiconductor systems."
