Any physics student knows from their first lessons in optics that light moves in straight lines, unaffected by other light rays—beams from two flashlights do not bounce off each other. However, Martin Wimmer at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, and colleagues have used a technique based on a so-called synthetic dimension to create pulses of light that interact and behave collectively as a superfluid [1]. In so doing, they have demonstrated this to be a tunable platform for exploring the interplay between many-body interactions, topology, and dissipation—features that are central to many fields of physics.
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