The statistical properties of physical systems in thermal equilibrium are blatantly different from their far-from-equilibrium counterparts. In the latter, fluctuations often dominate the dynamics and might cluster in ordered patterns in the form of dissipative coherent structures. Here, we study the transition of a cold atomic cloud, driven close to a sharp electronic resonance, from a stable to a turbulent phase. From the atomic density distribution---measured using a spatially resolved pump-probe technique---we have computed the Shannon entropy on two different basis sets. Information compression, corresponding to a minimum in the Shannon entropy, has been observed at criticality, where the system fluctuations organize into high-order (low-entropy) patterns. Being independent of the representation used, this feature is a property shared by a vast class of physical systems undergoing phase transitions.
The statistical properties of physical systems in thermal equilibrium are blatantly different from their far-from-equilibrium counterparts. In the latter, fluctuations often dominate the dynamics and might cluster in ordered patterns in the form of dissipative coherent structures. Here, we study the transition of a cold atomic cloud, driven close to a sharp electronic resonance, from a stable to a turbulent phase. From the atomic density distribution---measured using a spatially resolved pump-probe technique---we have computed the Shannon entropy on two different basis sets. Information compression, corresponding to a minimum in the Shannon entropy, has been observed at criticality, where the system fluctuations organize into high-order (low-entropy) patterns. Being independent of the representation used, this feature is a property shared by a vast class of physical systems undergoing phase transitions.
Abstract Far-from equilibrium dynamics that lead to self-organization are highly relevant to complex dynamical systems not only in physics, but also in life-, earth-, and social sciences. It is challenging however to find systems with sufficiently controllable parameters that allow quantitatively modelling of emergent properties. Here, we study a non-equilibrium phase transition and observe signatures of self-organized criticality in a dilute thermal vapour of atoms optically excited to strongly interacting Rydberg states. Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) provides excellent control over the population dynamics and enables high-resolution probing of the driven-dissipative dynamics, which also exhibits phase bistability. Increased sensitivity compared to previous work allows us to reconstruct the complete phase diagram including in the vicinity of the critical point. We observe that interaction-induced energy shifts and enhanced decay only occur in one of the phases above a critical Rydberg population. This limits the application of generic mean-field models, however a modified, threshold-dependent approach is in qualitative agreement with experimental data. Near threshold, we observe self-organized dynamics in the form of population jumps that return the density to a critical value.
Turbulent radiation flow is commonplace in systems with strong, incoherent, light-matter interactions. In astrophysical contexts, photon bubble turbulence is considered a key mechanism behind enhanced radiation transport, and its importance has been widely asserted for a variety of high energy objects such as accretion disks and massive stars. Here, we show that analogous conditions to those of dense astrophysical objects can be obtained in large clouds of cold atoms, prepared in a laser-cooling experiment, driven close to a sharp electronic resonance. By accessing the spatially-resolved atom density, we are able to identify a photon bubble instability and the resulting regime of photon bubble turbulence. We also develop a theoretical model describing the coupled dynamics of both photon and atom gases, which accurately describes the statistical properties of the turbulent regime. This study thus opens the possibility of simulating radiation-dominated astrophysical systems in cold atom experiments.
Far-from-equilibrium dynamics that lead to self-organization are highly relevant to complex dynamical systems not only in physics but also in life, earth, and social sciences.However, it is challenging to find systems with sufficiently controllable parameters that allow quantitatively modeling of emergent properties.Here, we study a nonequilibrium phase transition and observe signatures of self-organized criticality in a dilute thermal vapor of atoms optically excited to strongly interacting Rydberg states.Electromagnetically induced transparency provides excellent control over the population dynamics and enables highresolution probing of the driven-dissipative dynamics, which also exhibits phase bistability.Increased sensitivity compared to previous work allows us to reconstruct the complete phase diagram, including in the vicinity of the critical point.We observe that interaction-induced energy shifts and enhanced decay only occur in one of the phases above a critical Rydberg population.This case limits the application of generic mean-field models; however, a modified, threshold-dependent approach is in qualitative agreement with experimental data.Near threshold, we observe self-organized dynamics in the form of population jumps that return the density to a critical value.
The theory of continuous phase transitions predicts the universal collective properties of a physical system near a critical point, which for instance manifest in characteristic power-law behaviours of physical observables. The well-established concept at or near equilibrium, universality, can also characterize the physics of systems out of equilibrium. The most fundamental instance of a genuine non-equilibrium phase transition is the directed percolation (DP) universality class, where a system switches from an absorbing inactive to a fluctuating active phase. Despite being known for several decades it has been challenging to find experimental systems that manifest this transition. Here we show theoretically that signatures of the DP universality class can be observed in an atomic system with long-range interactions. Moreover, we demonstrate that even mesoscopic ensembles—which are currently studied experimentally—are sufficient to observe traces of this non-equilibrium phase transition in one, two and three dimensions.
From almost one century, Bose-Einstein condensation has become progressively more important especially due to its connection with superfluidity, superconductivity and manybody physics. Nowadays quantum gases are powerful experimental tools to discover new physics and to emulate systems in condensed matter due to their versatility and very high control. Despite the increasing use of quantum gases as platforms for studying many problems in physics, their comprehension is very limited if we consider systems that are out-of-equilibrium due to the lack of experimental controllability of all the parameters involved in these systems. Another limitation in the understanding of this kind of systems comes from the limitation of the theoretical frameworks used to understand non-equilibrium dynamics, although many efforts have been made in this direction. Hence, many interesting phenomena in non-equilibrium quantum systems have not yet been discovered or well understood from a theoretical and experimental point of view, and thus its physics have not been the focus of much attention, although this situation has recently changed due to the rapid development of experimental techniques which enables a better control of parameters of these systems. Motivated by this progress, we study non-equilibrium Bose gases in the search of turbulence using an oscillatory excitation performed in a Bose-Einstein condensate of 87 Rb atoms. In this thesis, we describe these experiments and characterize our non-equilibrium quantum system through some quantifiers. One of these quantifiers is a dimensionless value that represent the exponent obtained from the cascade of the transverse momentum distribution ( ). ( ) is obtained from absorption images of atoms in expansion using the time-of-flight technique in a well defined range of momenta. We analyze the dependence of with the amount of the pumped energy, and we found a steady-value which describe a well-established non-equilibrium regime. Also, it is analyzed the viability of using the fluctuations statistics in order to extract some quantifier from the power-spectrum of the fluctuations assuming that it represents an analog to the energy spectrum, due to the consideration of the time-of-flight technique. From the powerspectrum it is extracted an exponent, in the same range as for ( ), and compared with -2, that will be the exponent for the pseudo-energy spectrum in the kinetic dominated regime. Finally, we consider, again with the time-of-flight technique, the continuous Shannon entropy as quantifier that measure the disorder of the excited clouds and study their dependence with the pumped energy. These studies show us that there is an out-ofequilibrium regime that takes place when we inject a fixed quantity of energy into the system.
Abstract Using a non-perturbative quantum kinetic framework, we develop a unified description of the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional Bose gases following cooling quenches across the Bose-Einstein condensation transition. By tracking the spatio-temporal evolution of the momentum distribution, we show that the equilibrium condensation threshold simultaneously acts as a dynamical critical point, separating distinct far-from-equilibrium universality classes governed by different non-equilibrium attractors. While quenches above the transition exhibit a single-timescale relaxation toward a thermal fixed point, quenches below the transition display a crossover from a transient weak-turbulence regime to a coarsening fixed point governed by the diffusive recombination of vortex lines. Quenches directly to the condensation threshold, finally, are controlled by a previously unidentified critical fixed point characterized by the superdiffusive spreading of critical fluctuations and a distinct set of dynamical exponents. Together, these dynamical scaling laws establish a far-from-equilibrium counterpart of the condensation phase transition, in which the equilibrium critical point also organizes the long-time non-equilibrium dynamics.