Optomechanical signature of a frictionless flow of superfluid light

Abstract

We propose an experimental setup that should make it possible to reveal the frictionless flow of a superfluid of light from the suppression of the drag force that it exerts onto a material obstacle. In the paraxial-propagation geometry considered here, the photon-fluid dynamics is described by a wave equation analogous to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation of dilute Bose-Einstein condensates and the obstacle consists in a solid dielectric slab immersed into a nonlinear optical liquid. By means of an ab initio calculation of the electromagnetic force experienced by the obstacle, we anticipate that superfluidity is detectable in state-of-the-art experiments from the disappearance of the optomechanical deformation of the obstacle.