video: This movie highlights a double polariton vortex coherently excited by a picosecond laser vorticant pulse in a 120x120 micron area of the device and then left free to evolve. It keeps rotating for tens of thousands optical loops before being washed away by nonlinear polaritonic interactions and evaporating out due to photon leakage dissipations. The rotation at the optical frequency (in the order of the fs) has been slowed down by a factor of several hundreds just to let it be represented together with the vortex evolution in the order of the 10 ps lifetime of polaritons. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Dec. 4, 2015, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by L. Dominici at Centre National de la Recherche (CNR) NANOTEC-Istituto di Nanotecnologia in Lecce, Italy, and colleagues was titled, 'Vortex and half-vortex dynamics in a nonlinear spinor quantum fluid.' view more
Credit: [Credit: Lorenzo Dominici <i>et al.</i>]