Dissipation-engineered family of nearly dark states in many-body cavity-atom systems

Three-level atomic systems coupled to light have the potential to host dark states. We study a system of V-shaped three-level atoms coherently coupled to the two quadratures of a dissipative cavity. The interplay between the atomic level structure and dissipation drastically modifies the phase diagram of the system. In particular, it leads to the stabilization of a continuous family of dark and nearly dark excited many-body states with inverted atomic populations as the steady states. The multistability of these states can be probed via their distinct fluctuations and excitation spectra, as well as the system's Liouvillian dynamics which are highly sensitive to ramp protocols. Our model can be implemented experimentally where the two higher-energy modes are addressed by orthogonal density-modulated states in a bosonic quantum gas. This implementation can potentially realize a microscopy of subwavelength spatial resolution by probing the associated fluctuations.