Probing and Controlling Non-Equilibrium Dynamical Phenomena in Many-Body Quantum Systems

by Dr Cătălin-Mihai Halați (University of Geneva)

Tuesday 30 Jul 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

WHGA/121

One of the goals of modern condensed matter is to design and control the behavior of quantum materials. The complexity of such many-body systems can be harnessed by engineering the couplings to external fields and environments. In this talk, I will focus on two scenarios in which we take many-body systems out of equilibrium in order to probe, or control, their dynamics.

In the first part, we investigate the full quantum evolution of ultracold interacting bosonic atoms on a chain coupled to an optical cavity, following a quench in the atoms-cavity coupling. We analyze influence the effects of the dissipative quantum nature of the cavity field on the atomic dynamics. By engineering atoms-cavity coupling we can control the atomic correlations, protecting certain coherences up to long time, while rapidly suppressing others.

In the second part, we compute the Hall response of hardcore bosonic atoms on a triangular ladder in a magnetic field. We show that the behavior of the Hall polarization, both in its saturation value and in the short-time dynamics, correlates with the features of the underlying phase diagram. Thus, one can employ the Hall response as a sensitive probe of the many-body chiral quantum phases stemming from the interplay of interactions and geometric frustration.