Emerging dissipative phases in a superradiant quantum gas with tunable decay

Understand

Exposing a many-body system to external drives and losses can transform the nature of its phases and opens perspectives for engineering new properties of matter.

• How such characteristics are related to the underlying microscopic processes of the driven and dissipative system is a fundamental question.
• Here we address this point in a quantum gas that is strongly coupled to a lossy optical cavity mode using two independent Raman drives, which act on the spin and motional degrees of freedom of the atoms.
• This setting allows us to control the competition between coherent dynamics and dissipation by adjusting the imbalance between the drives.