Coherent Plasma in a Lattice

Abstract

We present a fully second-quantized calculation showing the emergence of spontaneous coherent configurations of the electromagnetic field in interaction with charged bosons in a regular lattice. The bosons tend to oscillate at their plasma frequency, but are also subjected to electrostatic forces which keep them confined close to lattice sites and cause a frequency shift in the oscillation. Under certain conditions on these frequencies, we find that a suitably defined set of coherent states (coherent both in the field and matter degrees of freedom) exhibit a negative energy gap with respect to the perturbative ground state. This is true in the RWA approximation and for position-independent fields, both to first and second order in the interaction Hamiltonian. We compare this result with other recent findings from cavity QED and notice that: (1) consideration of full 3D wavefunctions and a careful definition of the coherent states are essential for obtaining the energy gap; (2) although our calculation is referred to bosons, it may also apply to protons bound in a crystal matrix, if their density is very low compared to the density of available states.