Dissipation-engineered family of nearly dark states in many-body cavity-atom systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how dissipation in a cavity-atom system stabilizes a family of nearly dark, excited many-body states with inverted populations, revealing new phase behaviors and potential applications in quantum optics.

Contribution

It introduces a model of V-shaped three-level atoms coupled to a dissipative cavity, showing the stabilization of dark and nearly dark states due to dissipation, which differs from closed system predictions.

Findings

Stabilization of a continuous family of dark and nearly dark states

Multistability revealed through fluctuations and excitation spectra

System's dynamics highly sensitive to ramp protocols

Abstract

Three-level atomic systems coupled to light have the capacity to host dark states. We study a system of V-shaped three-level atoms coherently coupled to the two quadratures of a dissipative cavity. The interplay between the atomic level structure and dissipation makes the phase diagram of the open system drastically different from the closed one. In particular, it leads to the stabilization of a continuous family of dark and nearly dark excited many-body states with inverted atomic populations as the steady states. The multistability of these states can be probed via their distinct fluctuations and excitation spectra, as well as the system's Liouvillian dynamics which are highly sensitive to ramp protocols. Our model can be implemented experimentally by encoding the two higher-energy modes in orthogonal density-modulated states in a bosonic quantum gas. This implementation offers prospects for potential applications like the realization of quantum optical random walks and microscopy with subwavelength spatial resolution.