Dissipative time crystal in an atom-cavity system: Influence of trap and competing interactions

Abstract

While the recently realized dissipative time crystal in a laser-pumped atom-cavity system in the experiment of Keßler et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 043602 (2021)] is qualitatively consistent with a theoretical description in an idealized limit, here, we investigate the stability of this dissipative time crystal in the presence of an inhomogeneous potential provided by a harmonic trap, and competing short- and infinite-range interactions. We note that these features are ubiquitous in any realization of atom-cavity systems. By mapping out the dynamical phase diagram and studying how it is modified by the harmonic trap and short-range interactions, we demonstrate the persistence of long-lived dissipative time crystals beyond the idealized limit. We show the emergence of metastable dissipative time crystals with and without prethermalization plateaus for tight harmonic confinement and strong contact interaction, respectively.

10 pages, 9 figures

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• Quantum fluids of light
• Cold atoms in cavity-generated dynamical optical potentials
• Dynamical phase transition in the open Dicke model
• Discrete Time-Crystalline Order in Cavity and Circuit QED Systems
• Observation of a many-body-localized discrete time crystal with a programmable spin-based quantum simulator
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Non-equilibrium phases of Fermi gas inside a cavity with imbalanced pumping
• Theory of parametric resonance for discrete time crystals in fully-connected spin-cavity systems