Hydrodynamic nucleation of quantized vortex pairs in a polariton quantum fluid

Quantized vortices appear in quantum gases at the breakdown of superfluidity. In liquid helium and cold atomic gases, they have been indentified as the quantum counterpart of turbulence in classical fluids. In the solid state, composite light‐matter bosons known as exciton polaritons have enabled studies of non-equilibrium quantum gases and superfluidity. However, there has been no experimental evidence of hydrodynamic nucleation of polariton vortices so far. Here we report the experimental study of a polariton fluid flowing past an obstacle and the observation of nucleation of quantized vortex pairs in the wake of the obstacle. We image the nucleation mechanism and track the motion of the vortices along the flow. The nucleation conditions are established in terms of local fluid density and velocity measured on the obstacle perimeter. The experimental results are successfully reproduced by numerical simulations based on the resolution of the Gross‐Pitaevskii equation. H ydrodynamic instabilities in classical fluids were studied in the pioneering experiments of BOnard in the 1910’s. Convective BOnardRayleigh flows and BOnardVon KAErmAEn streets are now well known examples in nonlinear and chaos sciences 1 . In conventional fluids, the flow around an obstacle is characterized by the dimensionless Reynolds number ReD vR= , withv and the fluid velocity and dynamical viscosity, respectively, and R the diameter of the obstacle. When increasing the Reynolds number, laminar flow, stationary vortices, BOnardVon KAErmAEn streets of moving vortices and fully turbulent regimes are successively observed in the wake of the obstacle 1 .