What if you could do the experiments of a cold-atom lab without a vacuum chamber, without a MOT, and with a full image of the wavefunction in every shot? Laser light propagating through a hot rubidium vapor behaves like a two-dimensional quantum fluid, and we can image its full field (density and phase) at each step of its evolution. We recently used this to watch the fluid order itself after a quench: vortices annihilate, phase domains grow, and the dynamics turns out to be self-similar. Beyond the usual two-point correlations, we found that the whole distribution of a local order parameter rescales with a single length, the distance between vortices. During the internship you will extend this to new initial states and to two-component fluids, analyze the data (vortex tracking, cumulants, finite-size statistics), and compare with numerical simulations of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. The work combines hands-on optics with data analysis, and you will join a small team at LKB (Jussieu).