Signatures of Self-Organised Criticality in an Ultracold Atomic Gas
| Autor: | Michael Buchhold, S. Helmrich, Shannon Whitlock, A. Arias, Sebastian Diehl, G. Lochead, T. M. Wintermantel |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Physics
Quantum Physics Multidisciplinary Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) FOS: Physical sciences 01 natural sciences Self-organized criticality 010305 fluids & plasmas Physics - Atomic Physics Criticality Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas) Critical point (thermodynamics) Excited state 0103 physical sciences Attractor Statistical physics Quantum Physics (quant-ph) 010306 general physics Condensed Matter - Quantum Gases Scaling Stationary state Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics |
| Zdroj: | Nature |
| Popis: | Self organisation provides an elegant explanation for how complex structures emerge and persist throughout nature. Surprisingly often, these structures exhibit remarkably similar scale-invariant properties. While this is sometimes captured by simple models that feature a critical point as an attractor for the dynamics, the connection to real-world systems is exceptionally hard to test quantitatively. Here we observe three key signatures of self-organised criticality in the dynamics of a driven-dissipative gas of ultracold atoms: (i) self-organisation to a stationary state that is largely independent of the initial conditions, (ii) scale-invariance of the final density characterised by a unique scaling function, and (iii) large fluctuations of the number of excited atoms (avalanches) obeying a characteristic power-law distribution. This establishes a well-controlled platform for investigating self-organisation phenomena and non-equilibrium criticality with unprecedented experimental access to the underlying microscopic details of the system. final version, including data on power-law distributed avalanches |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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