5) Observation of Photon Droplets and Their Dynamics

Date Published: April 29, 2019

The Wright research group presents experimental evidence of photon droplets in an attractive (focusing) nonlocal nonlinear medium. Photon droplets are self-bound, finite-sized states of light that are robust to size and shape perturbations due to a balance of competing attractive and repulsive forces. Theoretically the self-bound state arises due to competition between the s-wave and d-wave nolinear terms, along with diffraction. This research presents numerics and experiments supporting the existence of photon droplet states and measurements of the dynamical evolution of the photon droplet orbital angular momentum.

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A pseudoenergy landscape and square images showing the transverse intensity profile and nonlinear potential for the ground state