Controlling the energy flow processes and the associated energy relaxation rates of a light emitter is of high fundamental interest, and has many applications in the fields of quantum optics, photovoltaics, photodetection, biosensing and light emission. While advanced dielectric and metallic systems have been developed to tailor the interaction between an emitter and its environment, active control of the energy flow has remained challenging. Here, we demonstrate in-situ electrical control of the relaxation pathways of excited erbium ions, which emit light at the technologically relevant telecommunication wavelength of 1.5 µm. By placing the erbium at a few nanometres distance from graphene, we modify the relaxation rate by more than a factor of three, and control whether the emitter decays into either electron-hole pairs, emitted photons or graphene near-infrared plasmons, confined to <15 nm to the sheet. These capabilities to dictate optical energy transfer processes through electrical control of the local density of optical states constitute a new paradigm for active (quantum) photonics.Spontaneous emission constitutes a canonical example of energy flow from an excited light emitter into its environment, where energy relaxation takes place via photon emission. Alternatively, for an emitter in the vicinity of a solid, energy relaxation can occur through channels involving electronic excitations, such as electron-hole pairs and collective charge oscillations (plasmons). Tailoring spontaneous emission by modifying the local density of optical states (LDOS), which governs the emitter-environment interactions [1,2], has been achieved using, amongst others, optical cavities [3][4][5][6], photonic crystals [7,8], and metallic nanostructures [9]. In these systems the LDOS available for the light emitters is typically a fixed property that depends only on the type and geometry of the material system. Here, we control electrically and in-situ the local density of optical states and therefore the energy relaxation rate of a nearby emitter, by employing graphene. Specifically, we demonstrate in-situ tuning of the magnitude and character of the energy transfer pathways from optically excited erbium ions -emitters for near-infrared light that are used as a gain medium in telecommunication applications [10,13]. This control enables new avenues in a range of fields, covering photovoltaics [11,12] The ability to control in-situ the LDOS requires a material for which the optical excitations that occur for a specific emission energy can be modified. Because graphene is gapless and it has a Fermi energy that is electrostatically tunable up to optical energies of ∼1 eV, it can effectively behave as a semiconductor, a dielectric, or a metal. Here, we propose to use these material characteristics to electrically control the relaxation rate and energy transfer processes of a dipolar emitter at subwavelength distance from the graphene. The concept of our experiment is shown in Fig. 1a, schematically representing the gate-tunable ener...

Symmetry-breaking quantum phase transitions play a key role in several condensed matter, cosmology and nuclear physics theoretical models [1][2][3] . Its observation in real systems is often hampered by finite temperatures and limited control of the system parameters. In this work we report, for the first time, the experimental observation of the full quantum phase diagram across a transition where the spatial parity symmetry is broken. Our system consists of an ultracold gas with tunable attractive interactions trapped in a spatially symmetric double-well potential. At a critical value of the interaction strength, we observe a continuous quantum phase transition where the gas spontaneously localizes in one well or the other, thus breaking the underlying symmetry of the system. Furthermore, we show the robustness of the asymmetric state against controlled energy mismatch between the two wells. This is the result of hysteresis associated with an additional discontinuous quantum phase transition that we fully characterize. Our results pave the way to the study of quantum critical phenomena at finite temperature 4 , the investigation of macroscopic quantum tunnelling of the order parameter in the hysteretic regime and the production of strongly quantum entangled states at critical points .Parity is a fundamental discrete symmetry of nature 6 conserved by gravitational, electromagnetic and strong interactions 7 . It states the invariance of a physical phenomenon under mirror reflection. Our world is pervaded by robust discrete asymmetries, spanning from the imbalance of matter and antimatter to the homo-chirality of DNA of all living organisms 8 . Their origin and stability is a subject of active debate. Quantum mechanics predicts that asymmetric states can be the result of phase transitions occurring at zero temperature, named in the literature as quantum phase transitions (QPTs) 1,4 . The breaking of a discrete symmetry via a QPT provides also asymmetric states that are particularly robust against external perturbations. Indeed, the order parameter of a continuous-symmetry-breaking QPT can freely (with no energy cost) wander along the valley of a 'mexican hat' Ginzburg-Landau potential (GLP) by coupling with gapless Goldstone modes 9 . In contrast, the order parameter of discrete-symmetry-breaking QPTs is governed by a one-dimensional double-well GLP 10 . The reduced dimensionality suppresses Goldstone excitations, and the order parameter can remain trapped at the bottom of one of the two wells. This provides a robust hysteresis associated with a first-order QPT.Evidence of parity-symmetry breaking has been reported in relativistic heavy-ions collisions 11 and in engineered photonic crystal fibres 12 . Observation of parity-symmetry breaking in a QPT has been reported for neutral atoms coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity 13 . However, this is a strongly dissipative system, with no direct access to the symmetry-breaking mechanism necessary to study the robustness of asymmetric states. In addition, previous the...

We explore the interplay between tunneling and interatomic interactions in the dynamics of a bosonic Josephson junction. We tune the scattering length of an atomic 39 K Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a double-well trap to investigate regimes inaccessible to other superconducting or superfluid systems. In the limit of small-amplitude oscillations, we study the transition from Rabi to plasma oscillations by crossing over from attractive to repulsive interatomic interactions. We observe a critical slowing down in the oscillation frequency by increasing the strength of an attractive interaction up to the point of a quantum phase transition. With sufficiently large initial oscillation amplitude and repulsive interactions the system enters the macroscopic quantum self-trapping regime, where we observe coherent undamped oscillations with a self-sustained average imbalance of the relative well population. The exquisite agreement between theory and experiments enables the observation of a broad range of many body coherent dynamical regimes driven by tunable tunneling energy, interactions and external forces, with applications spanning from atomtronics to quantum metrology.

We describe a compact, robust and versatile system for studying the macroscopic spin dynamics in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. Condensates of Rb 87 are produced by all-optical evaporation in a 1560 nm optical dipole trap, using a non-standard loading sequence that employs an ancillary 1529 nm beam for partial compensation of the strong differential light-shift induced by the dipole trap itself. We use near-resonant Faraday rotation probing to non-destructively track the condensate magnetization, and demonstrate few-Larmor-cycle tracking with no detectable degradation of the spin polarization. In the ferromagnetic F=1 ground state, we observe the spin orientation between atoms in the condensate is preserved, such that they precess all together like one large spin in the presence of a magnetic field. We characterize this dynamics in terms of the single-shot magnetic coherence times 1  and 2 *  , and observe them to be of several seconds, limited only by the residence time of the atoms in the trap. At the densities used, this residence is restricted only by one-body losses set by the vacuum conditions.