Bound Bogoliubov quasiparticles in photon superfluids

Bogoliubov’s description of Bose gases relies on the linear dynamics of noninteracting quasiparticles on top of a homogeneous condensate. Here, we theoretically explore the weakly-nonlinear regime of a one-dimensional photon superfluid in which phonon-like elementary excitations interact via their backreaction on the background flow. The generalized dispersion relation extracted from spatiotemporal intensity spectra reveals additional branches that correspond to bound Bogoliubov quasiparticles – phase-locked collective excitations originating from nonresonant harmonic-generation and wave-mixing processes. These mechanisms are inherent to fluctuation dynamics and highlight non-trivial scattering channels other than resonant interactions that could be relevant in the emergence of dissipative and turbulent phenomena in superfluids.