Driven-Dissipative Landau Polaritons: Two Highly Nonlinearly-Coupled Quantum Harmonic Oscillators
Abstract
Landau levels (LLs) are the massively-degenerate discrete energy spectrum of a charged particle in a transverse magnetic field and lie at the heart of many intriguing phenomena such as the integer and fractional quantum Hall effects as well as quantized vortices. In this Letter, we consider coupling of LLs of a transversely driven charge neutral particle in a synthetic gauge potential to a quantized field of an optical cavity -- a setting reminiscent of superradiant self-ordering setups in quantum gases. We uncover that this complex system can be surprisingly described in terms of two highly nonlinearly-coupled quantum harmonic oscillators, thus enabling a full quantum mechanical treatment. Light-matter coupling mixes the LLs and the superradiant photonic mode, leading to the formation of hybrid states referred to as ``Landau polaritons''. They inherit partially the degeneracy of the LLs and possess intriguing features such as non-zero light-matter entanglement and quadrature squeezing. Depending on the system parameters and the choice of initial state, the system exhibits diverse nonequilibrium quantum dynamics and multiple steady states, with distinct physical properties. This work lays the foundation for further investigating the novel, driven-dissipative Landau-polariton physics in quantum-gas--cavity-QED settings.