The quantum dynamics of the electromagnetic light mode of an optical cavity filled with a coherently driven Fermi gas of ultracold atoms strongly depends on the geometry of the Fermi surface. Superradiant light generation and self-organization of the atoms can be achieved at low pumping threshold due to resonant atom-photon umklapp processes, where the fermions are scattered from one side of the Fermi surface to the other by exchanging photon momenta. The cavity spectrum exhibits sidebands that, despite strong atom-light coupling and cavity decay, retain narrow linewidth, due to absorptionless transparency windows outside the atomic particle-hole continuum and the suppression of broadening and thermal fluctuations in the collisionless Fermi gas.
The quantum dynamics of the electromagnetic light mode of an optical cavity filled with a coherently driven Fermi gas of ultracold atoms strongly depends on the geometry of the Fermi surface. Superradiant light generation and self-organization of the atoms can be achieved at low pumping threshold due to resonant atom-photon umklapp processes, where the fermions are scattered from one side of the Fermi surface to the other by exchanging photon momenta. The cavity spectrum exhibits sidebands that, despite strong atom-light coupling and cavity decay, retain narrow linewidth, due to absorptionless transparency windows outside the atomic particle-hole continuum and the suppression of broadening and thermal fluctuations in the collisionless Fermi gas.
Lasing [1, 2] and superradiance [3‐5] phenomena are currently enjoying a renaissance as research topics in atomic physics. Fundamentally based on the interaction of matter with an electromagnetic (light) field, the atomic dipoles in a “lasing medium” collectively emit into selected modes of the electromagnetic field and thereby create an amplified and coherent source of light. Present-day lasers use di erent types of gain media and cover a wide range of output frequencies for application in both, fundamental research and industry. A recent string of papers has reported on superradiance [6, 7] and lasing-type instabilities using Bose gases of various type (thermal atoms [8, 9], photon gases [10] and Bose-Einstein condensed atoms [11‐14]) in optical cavities. Buoyed by experimental control over essentially single excitation quanta of atoms and photons [15‐19] in cavity quantum electrodynamics, these works o er intriguing prospects for the next wave of experiments on strongly interacting light-mattter systems including a new regime where unexpected many-body and quantum fluctuation e ects of the lasing medium may become visible. Bohnet et al. [20] recently operated a superradiant “bad-cavity” laser in the few-photon regime based on coherent oscillations of the inter-atomic, collective dipole of the ultracold atoms in the cavity [21]. In this paper, we point out that a quantum degenerate Fermi gas has remarkable features as a lasing medium in a transversally driven cavity as sketched in Fig. 1. We show that the quantum statistics of the Fermi gas puts the coupled cavity+atoms system generically close to superradiance threshold as a consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle (“Pauli pressure”). Physically, this arises from enhanced scattering of fermions between di erent points on the Fermi surface with radiusjkFj by exchanging relatively large photon momenta Q from the cavity as illustrated in Fig. 1. By changing the power of the pump laser at a given density of the Fermi gas, the lasing transition is concomitant with the spontaneous formation of a charge density wave oscillating with 1=Q in real space. Tuning the ratiojkFj=jQj allows to generate a cavity spectrum with “broadband light” in certain spectral ranges or, for energies outside the particle-hole continuum of the fermions, light with relatively narrow linewidth. The normal mode splitting of the cavity by a single atom is completely replaced by many-body Ω |kF| Q
Coupling Bose-Einstein condensates to optical cavities has enabled the study of many-body states with long-range interactions. However, equivalent experiments with ultracold Fermi gases have remained largely unexplored. Here, we report an experimental realization of a superradiant quantum phase transition of a degenerate Fermi gas in a transversely pumped optical cavity. The self-ordering checkerboard density pattern of Fermi gases and superradiant transitions of the cavity field spontaneously emerge by increasing the pumping intensity above a threshold value. The effects of Fermi statistics are manifested by an inverse square root scaling of the threshold with atom number and the slow dynamics of low–atomic momentum states. Our work provides an ideal platform for studying nonequilibirium dynamics of many-body states for long-range interacting Fermi gases.
Understanding the interplay between collective optical response and disorder presents significant challenges in modern many-body physics. While there has been considerable interest and a wealth of theoretical work in recent years, the experimental investigation of the superradiant phase transition and disorder has been unexplored. Here, we report an observation of the localization-driven superradiance with a degenerate Fermi gas in an optical cavity. We show that the dynamics of Fermi gases exhibits Anderson localization in an intracavity incommensurate lattice. The exponential localization is directly observed in both spatial and momentum spaces. We observe the localization driving a nearly vanishing pump threshold in fermionic superradiance when the system is in the localized state. The underlying mechanism of the self-organization and the quantum statistic of the atoms are revealed by measuring the atom momentum distribution and characteristic growth of the superradiant field. Our work provides a platform for studying superradiant quantum phase transition and localization in photon-mediated long-range interacting Fermi gases.
Cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) studies the interaction between atoms and a single electromagnetic mode. When the atoms form a degenerate quantum gas, the resulting lightâ matter interaction reflects the underlying quantum statistics of the particles. Recently, degenerate Fermi gases have been coupled to optical cavities, enabling the exploration of strongly correlated fermionic systems with interactions mediated by cavity photons. Remarkably, when disorder is introduced into such systems, the resulting model realizes fermions with random, long-range interactions characteristic of the Sachdevâ Yeâ Kitaev Hamiltonian. This platform therefore offers a possible route toward the experimental investigation of holographic duality, linking strongly interacting quantum matter to black hole physics through the AdS/CFT correspondence. As a step toward realizing this model, we developed a new technology: the cavity microscope. This device combines the strong light-matter coupling of cavity QED with the micrometer-scale spatial resolution provided by high-numerical-aperture optics. This thesis presents the operation and the first experimental results obtained with this new platform. First, the high-resolution addressing capability of the cavity microscope was used to locally modify the level structure of thermal atoms within the cavity mode. This allowed us to extract spatially resolved information about the atomic density from a global cavity measurement. In doing so, we overcome a longstanding limitation of cavity QED experiments, where the spatial structure of the light-matter interaction is typically fixed by the cavity mode and cannot be freely tuned. Second, we implemented a tightly focused optical trap that enabled the extraction of a small degenerate Fermi gas from a larger atomic cloud, coupled to the cavity mode. We then systematically investigated the light-matter interaction between this tweezer-trapped Fermi gas and the cavity mode by studying the superradiant phase transition of atoms in the cavity. We find that the transition can be either facilitated or suppressed by the fermionic occupation of phase space. The crossover between these two regimes occurs when the scattering wavevector becomes approximately twice the Fermi wavevector, revealing the crucial role of Fermi statistics in cavity-mediated interactions. These results pave the way toward the deterministic preparation of few-fermion systems inside an optical cavity, enabling the study of finite-size and trap-filling effects in cavity QED. In an upgraded version of the cavity microscope, the number of atoms can approach the cavity cooperativity, bringing the system into a new regime where entanglement can extend across the entire ensemble. Finally, by introducing time-dependent randomization of cavity-mediated interactions, this platform could realize low-rank SYK models, opening the door to experimental investigations of fast scrambling, thermalization, and quantum chaos in strongly interacting quantum matter.
We consider a spinless ultracold Fermi gas tightly trapped along the axis of an optical resonator and transversely illuminated by a laser closely tuned to a resonator mode. At a certain threshold pump intensity, the homogeneous gas density breaks a Z_{2} symmetry towards a spatially periodic order, which collectively scatters pump photons into the cavity. We show that this known self-ordering transition also occurs for low field seeking fermionic particles when the laser light is blue detuned to an atomic transition. The emergent superradiant optical lattice in this case is homopolar and possesses two distinct dimerizations. Depending on the spontaneously chosen dimerization, the resulting Bloch bands can have a nontrivial topological structure characterized by a nonvanishing Zak phase. In the case where the Fermi momentum is close to half of the cavity-mode wave number, a Peierls-like instability here creates a topological insulator with a gap at the Fermi surface, which hosts a pair of edge states. The topological features of the system can be nondestructively observed via the cavity output: the Zak phase of the bulk coincides with the relative phase between laser and cavity field, while the fingerprint of edge states can be observed as additional broadening in a well-defined frequency window of the cavity spectrum.
We study the far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics of periodically driven fermionic atoms in a lossy optical resonator. We show that the interplay of the Fermi surface with cavity losses leads to subnatural cavity linewidth narrowing, squeezed light, and nonthermal quantum statistics of the atoms. Adapting the Keldysh approach, we set up and solve a quantum kinetic Boltzmann equation in a systematic 1/N expansion with N the number of atoms. In the strict thermodynamic limit $N,V\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty},N/V=\text{const.}$ we find that the atoms (fermions or bosons) remain immune against cavity-induced heating or cooling. At next-to-leading order in 1/N, we find a ``one-way thermalization'' of the atoms determined by cavity decay. In absence of an equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation relation, the long-time limit $\ensuremath{\Delta}t\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ does not commute with the thermodynamic limit $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, such that for the physically relevant case of large but finite N, the dynamics ultimately becomes strongly coupled, especially close to the superradiance phase transition.