Supersolid Rotation in an Annular Bose-Einstein Condensate coupled to a Ring Cavity

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical study of a ring-cavity coupled Bose-Einstein Condensate, demonstrating supersolid phases with controllable rotation and symmetry-breaking, revealing new ways to generate chiral quantum matter and rotation-sensing devices.

Contribution

The work introduces a mean-field theory for supersolid phases in an annular BEC coupled to a ring cavity, highlighting interference-driven rotation without physical stirring and symmetry-breaking effects.

Findings

Supersolid states coexist with superfluid circulation under symmetric driving.

Chiral symmetry breaking leads to asymmetric cavity fields and directional density modulations.

Goldstone and Higgs modes are observable via cavity output spectrum measurements.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate an annularly confined Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) coupled to a four-mirror ring cavity supporting traveling-wave optical modes. Under symmetric driving by counter-propagating Laguerre-Gaussian beams carrying equal and opposite orbital angular momenta, the system realizes supersolid phases coexisting with persistent superfluid circulation. Specifically, we obtain a supersolid state if we start with a BEC of winding number $L_p$ as well as supersolid packets with coherent superpositions of two different BEC $L_p$ values. Under asymmetric pumping, realized with Laguerre-Gaussian beams of different orbital angular momenta, chiral symmetry is broken in the system, resulting in asymmetric cavity field amplitudes, directional density modulations, and tunable rotational dynamics of the resulting supersolid lattice. This leads to rotating supersolid density structures for a single winding-number state, and rotating wave packets for an initial superposition of rotational eigenstates. Finally, we probe the presence of Goldstone and Higgs modes which can be observed using minimally destructive measurements of the cavity output spectrum. Our mean-field theory reveals interference-driven rotation without physical stirring, and distinguishes our work from prior static cavity supersolids. Our results establish the ring cavity annular BEC as a versatile platform for generating chiral quantum matter, implementing rotation-sensing devices and generating atomtronic circuits with supersolids.