RQMP (CPM) Seminar

Excitations and dynamics of fractional quantum Hall fluids of light (and of atoms)

Iacopo Carusotto

Università di Trento

In this talk I will give an interdisciplinary review of the on-going theoretical and experimental research on strongly correlated fluids of light and of its connections to related work with ultracold atoms.

In the presence of a finite effective mass due to light confinement and binary interactions mediated by the optical nonlinearity of the material medium, an assembly of photons behave as a fluid of particles and displays intriguing collective hydrodynamic phenomena. Here I will concentrate on the regime of strong optical nonlinearities in the presence of synthetic gauge field for light, where optical analogs of quantum Hall effects can be observed.

After a general introduction, the first part of the talk will be devoted to the presentation of different schemes that exploit the intrinsic driven-dissipative nature of fluids of light to stabilize strongly correlated states such as Mott insulators or fractional quantum Hall liquids. After a brief review of the collective excitations across the non-equilibrium superfluid/insulator transition, I will then proceed with discussing observable signatures of the anyonic statistics of quasi-hole excitations in fractional quantum Hall fluids. I will conclude with an overview of on-going studies of the linear and non-linear dynamics of edge excitations and their description in terms of a generalized chiral Luttinger liquid.