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Abstract
This article reviews recent theoretical and experimental advances in the fundamental
understanding and active control of quantum fluids of light in nonlinear optical systems.
In presence of effective photon-photon interactions induced by the optical nonlinearity
of the medium, a many-photon system can behave collectively as a quantum fluid with
a number of novel features stemming from its intrinsically non-equilibrium nature.
We present a rich variety of photon hydrodynamical effects that have been recently
observed, from the superfluid flow around a defect at low speeds, to the appearance
of a Mach-Cherenkov cone in a supersonic flow, to the hydrodynamic formation of topological
excitations such as quantized vortices and dark solitons at the surface of large impenetrable
obstacles. While our review is mostly focused on a class of semiconductor systems
that have been extensively studied in recent years (namely planar semiconductor microcavities
in the strong light-matter coupling regime having cavity polaritons as elementary
excitations), the very concept of quantum fluids of light applies to a broad spectrum
of systems, ranging from bulk nonlinear crystals, to atomic clouds embedded in optical
fibers and cavities, to photonic crystal cavities, to superconducting quantum circuits
based on Josephson junctions. The conclusive part of our article is devoted to a review
of the exciting perspectives to achieve strongly correlated photon gases. In particular,
we present different mechanisms to obtain efficient photon blockade, we discuss the
novel quantum phases that are expected to appear in arrays of strongly nonlinear cavities,
and we point out the rich phenomenology offered by the implementation of artificial
gauge fields for photons.