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Abstract

We investigate fermionic atoms subjected to an optical lattice and coupled to a high finesse optical cavity with photon losses. A transverse pump beam introduces a coupling between the atoms and the cavity field. We explore the steady state phase diagram taking fluctuations around the mean-field of the atoms-cavity coupling into account. Our approach allows us to investigate both one- and higher-dimensional atomic systems. The fluctuations beyond mean-field lead to an effective temperature which changes the nature of the self-organization transition. We find a strong dependence of the results on the atomic filling, in particular when contrasting the behavior at low filling and at half filling. At low filling the transition to a self-organized phase takes place at a critical value of the pump strength. In the self-organized phase the cavity field takes a finite expectation value and the atoms show a modulation in the density. Surprisingly, at even larger pump strengths a strongly non-monotonous behavior of the temperature is found and hints towards effects of cavity cooling at many-body resonances. Additionally multiple self-organized stable solutions of the cavity field and the atoms occur, signaling the presence of a fluctuation-induced bistability, with the two solutions having different effective temperatures previously discussed in [Tolle et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 133602 (2025)]. In contrast, at half filling a bistable region arises at the self-organization transition already neglecting the fluctuations. The presence of the fluctuations induce an effective temperature as at lower filling and change the behavior of the transition and the steady states drastically. We analyze the properties of the occurring steady states of the coupled atoms-cavity system.