Tunable-range, photon-mediated atomic interactions in multimode cavity QED
Abstract
Optical cavity QED provides a platform with which to explore quantum many-body physics in driven-dissipative systems. Single-mode cavities provide strong, infinite-range photon-mediated interactions among intracavity atoms. However, these global all-to-all couplings are limiting from the perspective of exploring quantum many-body physics beyond the mean-field approximation. The present work demonstrates that local couplings can be created using multimode cavity QED. This is established through measurements of the threshold of a superradiant, self-organization phase transition versus atomic position. Specifically, we experimentally show that the interference of near-degenerate cavity modes leads to both a strong and {tunable-range} interaction between Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped within the cavity. We exploit the symmetry of a confocal cavity to measure the interaction between real BECs and their virtual images without unwanted contributions arising from the merger of real BECs. Atom-atom coupling may be tuned from short range to long range. This capability paves the way toward future explorations of exotic, strongly correlated systems such as quantum liquid crystals and driven-dissipative spin glasses.
Citation
Vaidya , V , Guo , Y , Kroeze , R , Ballantine , K , Kollár , A , Keeling , J M J & Lev , B 2018 , ' Tunable-range, photon-mediated atomic interactions in multimode cavity QED ' , Physical Review X , vol. 8 , no. 1 , 011002 . https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.011002
Publication
Physical Review X
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2160-3308Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright the Authors 2018. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Description
Funding: EPSRC program TOPNES (EP/I031014/1) (KEB, JK), Leverhulme Trust (IAF-2014-025) (JK).Collections
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