Structural Dynamics and Strong Correlations in Dynamical Quantum Optical Lattices

When placing an ultracold atomic gas inside a cavity, the light-matter coupling is enhanced and nonlinear atomic dynamics is generated, offering a promising platform for quantum simulation of models with short- and long-range interactions. Recently, superradiant self-organized phases for ultracold atomic gases inside a cavity, pumped by a blue detuned optical lattice, have been observed. Here, we explore the formation of quantum many-body phases of bosonic atoms inside an optical cavity, subject to transverse blue detuned pumping. We investigate the strongly interacting regime, which can be reached by tuning the s-wave scattering length using external fields. We analyze the interplay between superradiant self-organization with superfluid and Mott insulator phases, without the need of including higher lying bands, as the Wannier functions are dynamically linked to the cavity light via backaction. We observe different kinds of structural phase transitions driven by the light inside the cavity and the interplay with atomic collisions. We observe the mode softening at the critical points in the quantum phase transitions which can be measured in future experiments. We obtain our results within a full self-consistent theoretical framework, the light-matter density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), which employs the computation of light dependent Wannier functions for the full quantum optical lattice in combination with DMRG for the atomic dynamics. The methods introduced here can be used to analyze the effects of strong quantum correlations in strongly interacting light-matter systems.