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arXiv:2409.16035 · Physical Review Letters

Fluctuation-Induced Bistability of Fermionic Atoms Coupled to a Dissipative Cavity

Luisa Tolle, Ameneh Sheikhan, Thierry Giamarchi, Corinna Kollath, Catalin-Mihai Halati

Published Mar 31, 2025• 8 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the steady state phase diagram of fermionic atoms subjected to an optical lattice and coupled to a high finesse optical cavity with photon losses. The coupling between the atoms and the cavity field is induced by a transverse pump beam. Taking fluctuations around the mean-field solutions into account, we find that a transition to a self-organized phase takes place at a critical value of the pump strength. In the self-organized phase the cavity field takes a finite expectation value and the atoms show a modulation in the density. Surprisingly, at even larger pump strengths two self-organized stable solutions of the cavity field and the atoms occur, signaling the presence of a bistability. We show that the bistable behavior is induced by the atoms-cavity fluctuations and is not captured by the mean-field approach.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.134.133602

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We investigate the steady state phase diagram of fermionic atoms subjected to an optical lattice and coupled to a high finesse optical cavity with photon losses. The coupling between the atoms and the cavity field is induced by a transverse pump beam. Taking fluctuations around the mean-field solutions into account, we find that a transition to a self-organized phase takes place at a critical value of the pump strength. In the self-organized phase the cavity field takes a finite expectation value and the atoms show a modulation in the density. Surprisingly, at even larger pump strengths two self-organized stable solutions of the cavity field and the atoms occur, signaling the presence of a bistability. We show that the bistable behavior is induced by the atoms-cavity fluctuations and is not captured by the mean-field approach.
We investigate fermionic atoms subjected to an optical lattice and coupled to a high finesse optical cavity with photon losses. A transverse pump beam introduces a coupling between the atoms and the cavity field. We explore the steady-state phase diagram taking fluctuations around the mean field of the atoms-cavity coupling into account. Our approach allows us to investigate both one- and higher-dimensional atomic systems. The fluctuations beyond mean field lead to an effective temperature that changes the nature of the self-organization transition. We find a strong dependence of the results on the atomic filling, in particular when contrasting the behavior at low filling and at half filling. At low filling, the transition to a self-organized phase takes place at a critical value of the pump strength. In the self-organized phase, the cavity field takes a finite expectation value and the atoms show a modulation in the density. Surprisingly, at even larger pump strengths a strongly nonmonotonous behavior of the temperature is found and hints toward effects of cavity cooling at many-body resonances. Additionally multiple self-organized stable solutions of the cavity field and the atoms occur, signaling the presence of a fluctuation-induced bistability, with the two solutions having different effective temperatures previously discussed by Tolle . []. In contrast, at half filling a bistable region arises at the self-organization transition already neglecting the fluctuations. The presence of the fluctuations induce an effective temperature, as at lower fillings, and change the behavior of the transition and the steady states drastically. We analyze the properties of the occurring steady states of the coupled atoms-cavity system.
We study a transversely pumped atomic Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a single-mode optical cavity, where effective atom-atom interactions are mediated by pump and cavity photons. A number of experiments and theoretical works have shown the formation of a superradiant state in this setup, where interference of pump and cavity light leads to an optical lattice in which atoms self-consistently organize. This self-organization has been extensively studied using the approximate Dicke model (truncating to two momentum states), as well as through numerical Gross-Pitaevskii simulations in one and two dimensions. Here, we perform a full mean-field analysis of the system, including all relevant atomic momentum states and the cavity field. We map out the steady-state phase diagram vs pump strength and cavity detuning, and provide an in-depth understanding of the instabilities that are linked to the emergence of spatiotemporal patterns. We find and describe parameter regimes where the mean field predicts bistability, regimes where the dynamics form chaotic trajectories, instabilities caused by resonances between normal mode excitations, and states with atomic dynamics but vanishing cavity field.
Pattern formation of atoms in high-finesse optical resonators results from the mechanical forces of light associated with superradiant scattering into the cavity mode. It occurs when the laser intensity exceeds a threshold value such that the pumping processes counteract the losses. We consider atoms driven by a laser and coupling with a mode of a standing-wave cavity and describe their dynamics with a Fokker-Planck equation, in which the atomic motion is semiclassical but the cavity field is a full quantum variable. The asymptotic state of the atoms is a thermal state, whose temperature is solely controlled by the detuning between the laser and the cavity frequency and by the cavity loss rate. From this result we derive the free energy and show that in the thermodynamic limit self-organization is a second-order phase transition. The order parameter is the field inside the resonator to which one can associate a magnetization in analogy to ferromagnetism, the control field is the laser intensity, but the steady state is intrinsically out of equilibrium. In the symmetry-broken phase, quantum noise induces jumps of the spatial density between two ordered patterns: We characterize the statistical properties of this temporal behavior at steady state and show that the thermodynamic properties of the system can be extracted by detecting the light at the cavity output. The results of our analysis are in full agreement with previous studies; we extend them by deriving a self-consistent theory which is valid also when the cavity field is in the shot-noise limit and elucidate the nature of the self-organization transition.
We investigate the interplay between cavity-induced density-wave ordering and controllable disorder in a trapped two-dimensional gas of ultracold fermions. The atoms are dispersively coupled to an optical cavity and transversely driven by a pump beam, while an additional speckle beam spatially modulates the atom-light coupling through an AC-Stark shift of the atomic transition. In momentum space, this disorder converts the usual coupling between the cavity mode and a discrete set of density-wave Fourier components into a coupling to a continuum of fermionic density modes, weighted by the spectrum of the speckle pattern. Using linear response theory, we derive the superradiant threshold and show that the disordered interaction renormalizes the effective light-matter coupling, lowering the critical pump strength on average, with the threshold becoming self-averaging for short speckle correlation lengths. We complement this analysis with a numerical mean-field treatment that gives access to the intracavity photon number and to the real-space fermion density across the transition. These results confirm that the disorder shifts the photonic phase boundary and, above threshold, distorts the density-wave crystal by populating Fourier components beyond those selected by the clean cavity geometry. Our findings identify both the emitted cavity light and in situ density images as probes of engineered disorder in fermionic matter coupled to optical cavities.
Following the experimental realization of Dicke superradiance in Bose gases coupled to cavity light fields, we investigate the behavior of ultracold 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 show that cavity-field fluctuations can induce interesting magnetic phases and phase transitions in an atom-cavity coupled system. Adopting a numerical density-matrix-renormalization-group method, we study the steady state of a two-component Fermi gas subject to cavity-assisted Raman coupling in a one-dimensional lattice at half filling. The cavity-enhanced atom-photon coupling introduces a dynamic long-range interaction in the atoms, which competes with the short-range on-site interactions and leads to a rich phase diagram with a variety of magnetic orders. Importantly, as all the phase transitions take place outside the superradiant regime, the magnetic orders are associated with cavity-field fluctuations with a vanishing number of photons on the mean-field level.