Spatial correlations of vortex quantum states

Abstract

We study spatial correlations of vortices in different quantum states or with Bose or Fermi statistics. This is relevant for both optical vortices and condensed-matter ones such as microcavity polaritons, or any platform that can prepare and image fields in space at the few-particle level. While we focus on this particular case for illustration of the formalism, we already reveal unexpected features of spatial condensation whereby bosons exhibit a bimodal distribution of their distances which places them farther apart than fermions in over 40% of the cases, or on the opposite conceal spatial correlations to behave like coherent states. Such experiments upgrade in the laboratory successful techniques in uncontrolled extreme environments (stars and nuclei).