  One of the most fundamental properties of electromagnetism and special
relativity is the coupling between the spin of an electron and its orbital
motion. This is at the origin of the fine structure in atoms, the spin Hall
effect in semiconductors, and underlies many intriguing properties of
topological insulators, in particular their chiral edge states. Configurations
where neutral particles experience an effective spin-orbit coupling have been
recently proposed and realized using ultracold atoms and photons. Here we use
coupled micropillars etched out of a semiconductor microcavity to engineer a
spin-orbit Hamiltonian for photons and polaritons in a microstructure. The
coupling between the spin and orbital momentum arises from the polarisation
dependent confinement and tunnelling of photons between micropillars arranged
in the form of a hexagonal photonic molecule. Dramatic consequences of the
spin-orbit coupling are experimentally observed in these structures in the
wavefunction of polariton condensates, whose helical shape is directly visible
in the spatially resolved polarisation patterns of the emitted light. The
strong optical nonlinearity of polariton systems suggests exciting perspectives
for using quantum fluids of polaritons11 for quantum simulation of the
interplay between interactions and spin-orbit coupling.
