JILA Science Talk with Dr. Tobias Donner

Dissipative crystals of matter and light - from self-oscillating pumps to dissipation-stabilized phases

The time evolution of a driven quantum many-body system can be strongly affected by dissipation. Although this mainly implies that the system relaxes to a steady state, in some cases it can lead to the appearance of new phases and trigger emergent dynamics. I will report on experiments where we dispersively couple a quantum gas to an optical cavity. When the dissipation via cavity losses and the coherent timescales are comparable, we find a regime of persistent oscillations leading to a topological pumping of the atoms. Furthermore, I will report on the observation of a dissipation-stabilized phase in a system with tunable decay.