Stabilizing open photon condensates by ghost-attractor dynamics
Abstract
We study the temporal, driven-dissipative dynamics of open photon Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) in a dye-filled microcavity, taking the condensate amplitude and the noncondensed fluctuations into account on the same footing by means of a cumulant expansion within the Lindblad formalism. The fluctuations fundamentally alter the dynamics in that the BEC always dephases to zero for sufficiently long time. However, a ghost-attractor, although it is outside of the physically accessible configuration space, attracts the dynamics and leads to a plateau-like stabilization of the BEC for an exponentially long time, consistent with experiments. We also show that the photon BEC and the lasing state are separated by a true phase transition, since they are characterized by different fixed points. The ghost-attractor nonequilibrium stabilization mechanism is alternative to prethermalization and may possibly be realized on other dynamical platforms as well.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.16695,
title = {Stabilizing open photon condensates by ghost-attractor dynamics},
author = {Aya Abouelela and Michael Turaev and Roman Kramer and Moritz Janning and Michael Kajan and Sayak Ray and Johann Kroha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16695},
year = {2025}
}