Cavity induced collective behavior in the polaritonic ground state

Cavity quantum electrodynamics provides an ideal platform to engineer and control light-matter interactions with polariton quasiparticles. In this work, we investigate col-lective phenomena in a system of many particles in a harmonic trap coupled to a homo-geneous cavity vacuum field. The system couples collectively to the cavity field, through its center of mass, and collective polariton states emerge. The cavity field mediates pair -wise long-range interactions and enhances the effective mass of the particles. This leads to an enhancement of localization in the matter ground state density, which features a maximum when light and matter are on resonance, and demonstrates a Dicke-like, collective behavior with the particle number. The light-matter interaction also modifies the photonic properties of the polariton system, as the ground state is populated with bunched photons. In addition, it is shown that the diamagnetic A2 term is necessary for the stability of the system, as otherwise the superradiant ground state instability oc-curs. We demonstrate that coherent transfer of polaritonic population is possible with an external magnetic field and by monitoring the Landau-Zener transition probability.