Piazza, Francesco

Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Time: 14:00
Place: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HPF G 6
Host: Tobias Donner

Dynamical Self-Ordering of Superfluids and Light

Francesco Piazza
Universität Innsbruck, Austria

The strong back-action of an optically dense medium onto the electromagnetic field gives rise to interesting phenomena. One example is atomic self-ordering, whereby the particles spontaneously form a stationary Bragg pattern maximising the light scattering. It has been experimentally observed with thermal gases and more recently also with Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) inside optical resonators. In this talk, we present some new regimes of self-ordering with BECs, extending the so far explored regimes to two novel scenarios. Firstly, we will introduce a situation in which self-ordering appears as a dynamical limit-cycle phase evolving into chaos, whereby the superfluid nature of the BEC manifests itself through phase-slippage and turbulence. Secondly, we will consider a free-space configuration where no pre-selected light modes are imposed, so that self-ordering amounts to a real crystallisation of both the BEC, into a supersolid, and the light field, into an optical lattice with phonons.