Stability and decay of subradiant patterns in a quantum gas with photon-mediated interactions.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40668929.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adw0299 and PMC identifier 13155537.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Metastability and its relaxation mechanisms challenge our understanding of the stability of quantum many-body systems, revealing a gap between the microscopic dynamics of the individual components and the effective descriptions used for macroscopic observables. We observe excited self-ordered subradiant patterns in a quantum gas coupled to two optical cavities and report lifetimes far beyond the system's typical timescales. These patterns eventually decay through an abrupt transition reordering the atoms into a superradiant phase. Ab initio theory fully captures this macroscopic behavior, revealing that the subradiant patterns are stabilized by photon-mediated long-range interactions, thereby manifesting universal features of metastability characteristic of long-range interacting systems, as in astrophysics and plasma physics. Our work sheds light on the microscopic mechanisms stabilizing quantum states of matter and highlights the potential of photon-mediated forces for engineering correlations in many-body quantum systems.