Self-organized cavity bosons beyond the adiabatic elimination approximation

Abstract

The long-time behavior of weakly interacting bosons moving in a two-dimensional optical lattice and coupled to a lossy cavity is investigated numerically via the truncated Wigner method, which allows us to take into full account the dynamics of the cavity mode, quantum fluctuations, cavity-boson correlations, and self-organization of individual runs. We first compare our results for small systems with quasi-exact calculations based on quantum trajectories, finding a remarkably good agreement for experimentally relevant boson fillings that improves further with system size. For large systems, we observe metastability at very long times and superfluid quasi-long range order, in sharp contrast with the true long range order found in the ground state of the approximate Bose-Hubbard model with extended interactions, obtained by adiabatically eliminating the cavity field. As the strength of the light-matter coupling increases, the system first becomes supersolid at the Dicke superradiant transition and then turns into a charge-density wave via the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless mechanism. The two phase transitions are characterized via an accurate finite-size scaling analysis.