Stochastic transport of a Goldstone mode in a self-organized atomic crystal

Abstract

Spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry produces a massless Goldstone mode that can evolve across a degenerate manifold at zero energy cost. Goldstone modes have been identified primarily through excitation spectra, mode softening or collective oscillations. However, their time-domain transport under intrinsic fluctuations and dissipation has remained largely unexplored. Here we directly track the stochastic transport of a Goldstone mode in a self-organized atomic crystal inside an optical ring cavity. The ring cavity maps the order-parameter phase onto the real-space position of the emergent crystal. Without any external perturbation, fundamental photon-scattering recoil drives the collective transport, while cavity dissipation generates friction. We monitor individual trajectories of the atoms and their self-generated optical lattice by measuring the cavity output phase. We find that the diffusion constant decreases as $1/N$, indicating that all atoms move collectively as a rigid object rather than independently. By tuning the Langevin driving force and cavity-mediated damping, we show that the normalized diffusion constant collapses onto a single universal curve. This work extends the study of continuous symmetry breaking from excitation-frequency measurements to real-time tracking of transport, and opens routes for studying non-equilibrium collective transport, phonon dynamics, and defect formation in driven-dissipative quantum matter.