Showing papers by "Tobias Donner published in 2022"

Tunable Non-equilibrium Phase Transitions between Spatial and Temporal Order through Dissipation

Abstract: We propose an experiment with a driven quantum gas coupled to a dissipative optical cavity that realizes a novel kind of far-from-equilibrium phase transition between spatial and temporal order. The control parameter of the transition is the detuning between the drive frequency and the cavity resonance. For negative detunings, the system features a spatially ordered phase, while positive detunings lead to a phase with both spatial order and persistent oscillations, which we call dissipative spatio-temporal lattice. We give numerical and analytical evidence for this superradiant phase transition and show that the spatio-temporal lattice originates from cavity dissipation. In both regimes the atoms are subject to an accelerated transport, either via a uniform acceleration or via abrupt transitions to higher momentum states. Our work provides perspectives for temporal phases of matter that are not possible at equilibrium.

Crafting the dynamical structure of synchronization by harnessing bosonic multilevel cavity QED

Abstract: Many-body cavity QED experiments are established platforms to tailor and control the collective responses of ensembles of atoms, interacting through one or more common photonic modes. The rich diversity of dynamical phases they can host, calls for a unified framework. Here we commence this program by showing that a cavity QED simulator assembled from $N$-levels bosonic atoms, can reproduce and extend the possible dynamical responses of collective observables occurring after a quench. Specifically, by initializing the atoms in classical or quantum states, or by leveraging intra-levels quantum correlations, we craft on demand the entire synchronization/desynchronization dynamical crossover of an exchange model for $SU(N)$ spins. We quantitatively predict the onset of different dynamical responses by combining the Liouville-Arnold theorem on classical integrability with an ansatz for reducing the collective evolution to an effective few-body dynamics. Among them, we discover a synchronized chaotic phase induced by quantum correlations and associated to a first order non-equilibrium transition in the Lyapunov exponent of collective atomic dynamics. Our outreach includes extensions to other spin-exchange quantum simulators and a universal conjecture for the dynamical reduction of non-integrable all-to-all interacting systems.