No Arabic abstract
The Peierls instability toward a charge density wave is a canonical example of phonon-driven strongly correlated physics and is intimately related to topological quantum matter and exotic superconductivity. We propose a method to realize an analogous photon-mediated Peierls transition, using a system of one-dimensional tubes of interacting Bose or Fermi atoms trapped inside a multimode confocal cavity. Pumping the cavity transversely engineers a cavity-mediated metal--to--insulator transition in the atomic system. For strongly interacting bosons in the Tonks-Girardeau limit, this transition can be understood (through fermionization) as being the Peierls instability. We extend the calculation to finite values of the interaction strength and derive analytic expressions for both the cavity field and mass gap. They display nontrivial power law dependence on the dimensionless matter-light coupling.
Optical cavity QED provides a platform with which to explore quantum many-body physics in driven-dissipative systems. Single-mode cavities provide strong, infinite-range photon-mediated interactions among intracavity atoms. However, these global all-to-all couplings are limiting from the perspective of exploring quantum many-body physics beyond the mean-field approximation. The present work demonstrates that local couplings can be created using multimode cavity QED. This is established through measurements of the threshold of a superradiant, self-organization phase transition versus atomic position. Specifically, we experimentally show that the interference of near-degenerate cavity modes leads to both a strong and tunable-range interaction between Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped within the cavity. We exploit the symmetry of a confocal cavity to measure the interaction between real BECs and their virtual images without unwanted contributions arising from the merger of real BECs. Atom-atom coupling may be tuned from short range to long range. This capability paves the way toward future explorations of exotic, strongly correlated systems such as quantum liquid crystals and driven-dissipative spin glasses.
Sign-changing interactions constitute a crucial ingredient in the creation of frustrated many-body systems such as spin glasses. We present here the demonstration of a photon-mediated sign-changing interaction between Bose-Einstein condensed (BEC) atoms in a confocal cavity. The interaction between two atoms is of an unusual, nonlocal form proportional to the cosine of the inner product of the atoms position vectors. This interaction arises from the differing Gouy phase shifts of the cavitys degenerate modes. Moreover, these Gouy phase anomalies induce an extra pattern of Z_2-symmetry-breaking in the atomic density-wave self-ordering that arises from a nonequilibrium Dicke-type phase transition in the system. This state is detected via the holographic imaging of the cavitys superradiant emission. Together with Ref. [1], we explore this interactions influence on superradiant phase transitions in multimode cavities. Employing this interaction in cavity QED spin systems may enable the creation of artificial spin glasses and quantum neural networks.
We study the collisional processes that can lead to thermalization in one-dimensional systems. For two body collisions excitations of transverse modes are the prerequisite for energy exchange and thermalzation. At very low temperatures excitations of transverse modes are exponentially suppressed, thermalization by two body collisions stops and the system should become integrable. In quantum mechanics virtual excitations of higher radial modes are possible. These virtually excited radial modes give rise to effective three-body velocity-changing collisions which lead to thermalization. We show that these three-body elastic interactions are suppressed by pairwise quantum correlations when approaching the strongly correlated regime. If the relative momentum $k$ is small compared to the two-body coupling constant $c$ the three-particle scattering state is suppressed by a factor of $(k/c)^{12}$, which is proportional to $gamma ^{12}$, that is to the square of the three-body correlation function at zero distance in the limit of the Lieb-Liniger parameter $gamma gg 1$. This demonstrates that in one dimensional quantum systems it is not the freeze-out of two body collisions but the strong quantum correlations which ensures absence of thermalization on experimentally relevant time scales.
Following the experimental realization of Dicke superradiance in Bose gases coupled to cavity light fields, we investigate the behavior of ultra cold fermions in a transversely pumped cavity. We focus on the equilibrium phase diagram of spinless fermions coupled to a single cavity mode and establish a zero temperature transition to a superradiant state. In contrast to the bosonic case, Pauli blocking leads to lattice commensuration effects that influence self-organization in the cavity light field. This includes a sequence of discontinuous transitions with increasing atomic density and tricritical superradiance. We discuss the implications for experiment.
We report the experimental realization of a topological Creutz ladder for ultracold fermionic atoms in a resonantly driven 1D optical lattice. The two-leg ladder consists of the two lowest orbital states of the optical lattice and the cross inter-leg links are generated via two-photon resonant coupling between the orbitals by periodic lattice shaking. The characteristic pseudo-spin winding in the topologically non-trivial bands of the ladder system is demonstrated using momentum-resolved Ramsey-type interferometric measurements. We discuss a two-tone driving method to extend the inter-leg link control and propose a topological charge pumping scheme for the Creutz ladder system.