2019/10/31 by Rui Lin, Paolo Molignini, Axel U. J. Lode +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.101.061602
published as Phys. Rev. A 101, 061602 (2020) · 14 pages, 9 figures (including 7 pages, 5 figures in the supplementary material)
arxiv created 2020/05/25 · arxiv updated 2020/07/08
We explore the role of atomic correlations in a harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a dissipative cavity, where both the atoms and the cavity are blue detuned from the external pumping laser. Using a genuine many-body approach that goes beyond mean-field, we extract density distributions and many-body correlations to unveil a pathway to chaos at large pump power through a hierarchical self-organization of the atoms, where the atoms transition from a single-well optical lattice to a double-well optical lattice. Correlated states of the atoms emerge and are characterized by local superfluid correlations in phases which are globally superfluid or Mott insulating. Local superfluid-Mott transitions are precluded by a dynamical instability to chaos which occurs via quasiperiodic attractors. Our results explain the mechanism behind the dynamical instabilities observed in experiments.