Optomechanical self-organization in a mesoscopic atom array

Understand

Increasing the number of particles in a system often leads to qualitative changes in its properties, such as breaking of symmetries and the appearance of phase transitions.

• This renders a macroscopic system fundamentally different from its individual microscopic constituents.
• Lying between these extremes, mesoscopic systems exhibit microscopic fluctuations that influence behavior on longer length scales, leading to critical phenomena and dynamics.
• Therefore, tracing the properties of well-controlled mesoscopic systems can help bridge the gap between an exact description of few-body microscopic systems and the emergent description of many-body systems.