Supermode-density-wave-polariton condensation with a Bose-Einstein condensate in a multimode cavity
Abstract
Phase transitions, where observable properties of a many-body system change discontinuously, can occur in both open and closed systems. By placing cold atoms in optical cavities and inducing strong coupling between light and excitations of the atoms, one can experimentally study phase transitions of open quantum systems. Here we observe and study a non-equilibrium phase transition, the condensation of supermode-density-wave polaritons. These polaritons are formed from a superposition of cavity photon eigenmodes (a supermode), coupled to atomic density waves of a quantum gas. As the cavity supports multiple photon spatial modes and because the light–matter coupling can be comparable to the energy splitting of these modes, the composition of the supermode polariton is changed by the light–matter coupling on condensation. By demonstrating the ability to observe and understand density-wave-polariton condensation in the few-mode-degenerate cavity regime, our results show the potential to study similar questions in fully multimode cavities.
Citation
Kollár , A J , Papageorge , A T , Vaidya , V D , Guo , Y , Keeling , J & Lev , B L 2017 , ' Supermode-density-wave-polariton condensation with a Bose-Einstein condensate in a multimode cavity ' , Nature Communications , vol. 8 , 14386 . https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14386
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright the Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description
Funding was provided by the Army Research Office. B.L.L. acknowledges support from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and A.J.K. and A.T.P. acknowledge support the NDSEG fellowship program. J.K. acknowledges support from EPSRC program "TOPNES" (EP/I031014/1) and from the Leverhulme Trust (IAF-2014-025).Collections
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