Turbulence Excitation in Counter-Streaming Paraxial Superfluids of Light

Turbulence in the quantum (superfluid) regime, similarly to its classical counterpart, continues to attract a great deal of scientific inquiry, due to the yet high number of unresolved problems. While turbulent states can be routinely created in degenerate atomic gases, there is no generic scheme to produce turbulence in fluids of light. Under paraxial propagation, light in bulk nonlinear media behaves as a two-dimensional superfluid, described by a nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation formally equivalent to the Gross-Pitaevskii model of a weakly interacting Bose gas, where photon-photon interactions are mediated by a third order (Kerr) nonlinearity. Here, we develop the theory describing the onset of a kinetic instability when two paraxial optical fluids with different streaming velocities interact via the optical nonlinearity. From numerical simulations of the nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation, we further characterize the onset of the instability and describe its saturation in the form of vortex nucleation and excitation of turbulence. The experimental observation of such effects is also discussed. The class of instabilities described here thus provide a natural route towards the investigation of quantum (superfluid) turbulence, structure formation and out-of-equilibrium dynamics in superfluids of light.
Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review A