Fluids of exciton polaritons, excitations of two-dimensional quantum wells in optical cavities, show collective phenomena akin to Bose condensation. However, a fundamental difference from standard condensates stems from the finite lifetime of these excitations, which necessitates continuous driving to maintain a steady state. A basic question is whether a two-dimensional condensate with long-range algebraic correlations can exist under these nonequilibrium conditions. Here, we show that such driven two-dimensional Bose systems cannot exhibit algebraic superfluid order except in low-symmetry, strongly anisotropic systems. Our result implies, in particular, that recent apparent evidence for Bose condensation of exciton polaritons must be an intermediate-scale crossover phenomenon, while the true long-distance correlations fall off exponentially. We obtain these results through a mapping of the long-wavelength condensate dynamics onto the anisotropic Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.
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