A Supersolid Made Using Photons

Manuele Landini from the University of Innsbruck was part of an international team led by researchers at CNR Nanotec in Lecce, Italy, that has demonstrated the emergence of a supersolid phase of matter in a photonic crystal polariton condensate. This pioneering work, published in Nature, introduces a new platform for exploring supersolidity beyond traditional ultracold atomic systems. A supersolid is a rare and counterintuitive phase of matter that uniquely combines the rigidity of a crystal with the frictionless flow of a superfluid. “We can visualise it as a fluid made up of quantum coherent droplets periodically arranged in space, which are able to flow through an obstacle without undergoing perturbations, while maintaining their spatial arrangement and mutual distance unchanged as it happens in a crystalline solid”, said Iacopo Carusotto from the Pitaevskii BEC Center in Trento. While supersolidity has been explored in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates previously, this research rep ... Read full article.