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Abstract

This thesis explores systems that exhibit strong coupling between an optical cavity field and a many-particle system. To treat the drive and dissipative nature of the cavity on the same footing as the dynamics of the many-particle system, we use a non-equilibrium field theoretic approach. The first system considered is an ultracold bosonic gas trapped inside a cavity. The dispersive coupling between the cavity field and the atoms' motion leads to the formation of a polariton. We show how a modulation of the pump laser on the energy scale of the transverse cavity mode splitting can be used to create effective interactions between different cavity modes. This effective interaction results in the polariton acquiring a multimode nature, exemplified by avoided crossings in the cavity spectrum. As the laser power is increased, the polariton softens and at a critical power becomes unstable. This instability signals the transition into a superradiant state. If the multimode polariton contains a cavity mode with an effective negative detuning, then the transition does not happen through a mode softening but at a finite frequency. To investigate this, classical non-linear equations are constructed from the action and from these we derive the critical couplings and frequencies. It is shown how the superradiant transition happening at a finite frequency is a consequence of a competition between the negatively and the positively detuned cavity modes making up the polariton. The finite-frequency transition is found to be equivalent to a Hopf bifurcation and leads to the emergence of limit cycles. Our analysis shows that the system can exhibit both bistabilities and evolution constricted to a two-torus. We end the investigation by showing how interactions among the atoms combined with the emerging limit cycle open new phonon scattering channels. The second system considered in the thesis is inspired by the recent experiments on gated Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMD) monolayers inside cavities. An exciton within the TMD can couple strongly to the cavity and, due to the electronic gating, also interact strongly with the conduction electrons. To treat the strong interactions of the excitons with both cavity and electrons, we solve the coupled equations for the correlation functions non-perturbatively within a ladder approximation. The strong interactions give rise to new quasiparticles known as polaron-polaritons. By driving the system through the cavity, we show how the competition between electron-induced momentum relaxation and cavity loss leads to the accumulation of polaritons at a small but finite momentum, which is accompanied by significant decrease of the polariton linewidth Due to the hybrid nature of the polaron-polariton, we show that this behavior can by qualitatively modified by changing the cavity detuning.