Polariton hydrodynamics for rotating analogue gravity*

Analogue gravity enables the study of fields on curved spacetimes in the laboratory. There are numerous experimental platforms in which amplification at the event horizon or the ergoregion has been observed. For example, polaritons in semiconductor microcavities may be made to behave as “fluids of light” and their flow can be engineered to create various geometries with, eg horizons and ergosurfaces. In this talk, I briefly review the physics of fluids of light with polaritons and then explain how to create a polariton flow analogous to the curved spacetime of a rotating black hole by generating a large vortex.
I then discuss experimental results on the propagation of dark solitons on this vortex and show how to theoretically describe their motion with field theory on curved spacetime. This opens up a discussion on the comparison between this description and actual lab data, which informs generic issues in analogue gravity experiments and promises access to phenomena beyond the established field theory such as dynamical instabilities and back-reaction of the spacetime onto emission.