Synthetic Berry curvature in atom-cavity systems
Abstract
In atom-cavity systems, mean field theory is widely used, in which the quantum cavity operator is replaced by a classical amplitude. Then the problem is converted into atoms moving in a self-consistent potential. The mean field treatment captures the physics of cavity mediated interactions, and predicts the self-organized superradiant phase. In this work, however, we show that it fails for certain atom-cavity coupling: it predicts zero ground state atomic current where the fully quantum calculation exhibits a finite one. We find that the origin of this failure is the non-zero Berry curvature in the synthetic dimension spanned by the photon Fock ladder and real space. In this synthetic picture, the atomic current can be understood as Hall response of cavity detuning, whereas mean field collapses this dimension and discards the atom--photon correlations required for its Hall response. The same beyond-mean-field geometry predicts Laughlin-like photon generation under adiabatic flux insertion. Our work identifies synthetic Berry curvature as a concrete mechanism for the breakdown of static mean field in atom--cavity physics.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{tang2026synthetic,
title = {{Synthetic Berry curvature in atom-cavity systems}},
author = {Zheng Tang and Rui-Lin Zhang and Xiaotian Nie and Li Chen and Wei Zheng},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.31067},
eprint = {2609.31067},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31067},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Synthetic Berry curvature in atom-cavity systems
AU - Zheng Tang
AU - Rui-Lin Zhang
AU - Xiaotian Nie
AU - Li Chen
AU - Wei Zheng
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.31067
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31067
AB - In atom-cavity systems, mean field theory is widely used, in which the quantum cavity operator is replaced by a classical amplitude. Then the problem is converted into atoms moving in a self-consistent potential. The mean field treatment captures the physics of cavity mediated interactions, and predicts the self-organized superradiant phase. In this work, however, we show that it fails for certain atom-cavity coupling: it predicts zero ground state atomic current where the fully quantum calculation exhibits a finite one. We find that the origin of this failure is the non-zero Berry curvature in the synthetic dimension spanned by the photon Fock ladder and real space. In this synthetic picture, the atomic current can be understood as Hall response of cavity detuning, whereas mean field collapses this dimension and discards the atom--photon correlations required for its Hall response. The same beyond-mean-field geometry predicts Laughlin-like photon generation under adiabatic flux insertion. Our work identifies synthetic Berry curvature as a concrete mechanism for the breakdown of static mean field in atom--cavity physics.
ER -