TopoLight Finds Room-Temperature Supersolid in Polariton Condensate, With Vortices in 10% of Runs
Updated
Updated · The Brighter Side of News · Nov 4
TopoLight Finds Room-Temperature Supersolid in Polariton Condensate, With Vortices in 10% of Runs
3 articles · Updated · The Brighter Side of News · Nov 4
Summary
Researchers observed a room-temperature supersolid phase in an exciton-polariton condensate, where ordered emission stripes formed but shifted position from one laser pulse to the next.
Across 500 realizations, stripe positions were nearly uniformly distributed, indicating spontaneous symmetry breaking rather than a pattern pinned by defects in the sample.
About 10% of runs also produced vortices—stripe dislocations and phase singularities—adding evidence of superfluid-like behavior in the driven light-matter quantum fluid.
The tunable device used 35-nanometer MeLPPP polymer layers, liquid crystal and voltage-controlled microcavity settings to create the spin-orbit-coupled states that generated the stripes.
The Science Advances study stops short of proving frictionless flow quantitatively, and sample quality degraded over days to weeks, leaving superfluid transport and device reliability for future work.