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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 13: Quantum Gases (Bosons) III

Q 13.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 15, 2022, 10:45–11:00, Q-H10

Engineering dynamical tunneling in a superradiant quantum gas — •Rodrigo Rosa-Medina, Francesco Ferri, Fabian Finger, Nishant Dogra, Katrin Kroeger, Rui Lin, R. Chitra, Tobias Donner, and Tilman Esslinger — ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland

Dynamic transients are a natural ingredient of non-equilibrium quantum systems. One paradigmatic example is Dicke superradiance, describing the collectively enhanced population inversion of an ensemble of two-level atoms coupled to a single mode of light. In this talk, we present a new experimental approach, which exploits superradiance in a quantum degenerate gas to engineer dynamical currents in a synthetic lattice geometry.

Our experimental implementation is based on a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a single mode of an ultrahigh finesse optical cavity. Two transverse laser fields induce cavity-assisted Raman transitions between discrete momentum states of two spin levels, which we interpret as tunnelling in a momentum space lattice [1]. As the cavity field depends on the local density and spin configuration, the tunneling rate evolves dynamically with the atomic state. By monitoring the cavity leakage, we gain real-time access to the emerging currents and benchmark their collective nature. Our results provide prospects to explore dynamical gauge fields and transport phenomena in driven-dissipative quantum systems.

[1] Rosa-Medina, R., Ferri, F., Finger, F., Dogra, N., Kroeger, K., Lin, R., Chitra, R., Donner, T., Esslinger, T. (2021). arXiv:2108.11888