Superfluidlike motion of vortices in light condensates

Phys Rev Lett. 2005 Mar 11;94(9):093901. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.093901. Epub 2005 Mar 8.

Abstract

We demonstrate, through numerical simulations, the generation of stable vortex lattices in light condensates. This can be achieved by propagating several concentric laser beams with nested vortices of different topological charges in an optical material with a cubic-quintic nonlinearity. We have considered several initial conditions, and in all the cases the net topological charges of the resulting lattice is equal to the topological charge of the initial outer vortex. The lattice exhibits rotation similar to vortex motion in superfluids. These vortex arrays could be used to implement all-optical photonic crystal fibers. Our results also apply to Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of three-body elastic interactions.