Driven-Dissipative Supersolid in a Ring Cavity

Farokh Mivehvar, Stefan Ostermann, Francesco Piazza, and Helmut Ritsch
Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 123601 – Published 23 March 2018
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Abstract

Supersolids are characterized by the counterintuitive coexistence of superfluid and crystalline order. Here we study a supersolid phase emerging in the steady state of a driven-dissipative system. We consider a transversely pumped Bose-Einstein condensate trapped along the axis of a ring cavity and coherently coupled to a pair of degenerate counterpropagating cavity modes. Above a threshold pump strength the interference of photons scattered into the two cavity modes results in an emergent superradiant lattice, which spontaneously breaks the continuous translational symmetry towards a periodic atomic pattern. The crystalline steady state inherits the superfluidity of the Bose-Einstein condensate, thus exhibiting genuine properties of a supersolid. A gapless collective Goldstone mode correspondingly appears in the superradiant phase, which can be nondestructively monitored via the relative phase of the two cavity modes on the cavity output. Despite cavity-photon losses the Goldstone mode remains undamped, indicating the robustness of the supersolid phase.

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  • Received 27 December 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.123601

© 2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied PhysicsAtomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Farokh Mivehvar1,*, Stefan Ostermann1, Francesco Piazza2, and Helmut Ritsch1,†

  • 1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
  • 2Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, D-01187 Dresden, Germany

  • *Corresponding author. farokh.mivehvar@uibk.ac.at
  • Corresponding author. helmut.ritsch@uibk.ac.at

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Issue

Vol. 120, Iss. 12 — 23 March 2018

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