The atom-cavity system is a versatile platform for emulating light-matter systems and realizing dissipation-induced phases, such as limit cycles (LCs) and time crystals. Here, we study the dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) inside an optical cavity with transverse pumping and an additional intracavity optical lattice along the cavity axis. Specifically, we explore the theoretical predictions obtained from expanding the atomic field operators of the second-quantized Hamiltonian in two ways: (i) position basis and (ii) single-band Wannier basis. Both bases agree on the existence of most types of static and dynamical phases. However, the large sea of irregular dynamical phase, captured within the position basis, is absent in the Wannier basis. Moreover, we show that they predict different types of LCs due to the inherent limitation of the single-band Wannier expansion, highlighting the importance of including higher energy bands to correctly capture certain phenomena. Using truncated Wigner approximation, we investigate the fragmentation dynamics of the BEC. We demonstrate that both position and Wannier bases qualitatively agree on the photon-mediated fragmentation dynamics of the BEC in the density-wave phase, despite the absence of interatomic interactions. The presence of interatomic interaction leads to further fragmentation, which can only be observed in larger system sizes. Finally, we predict a sudden increase in the fragmentation behavior for larger pump intensities.

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• Bose gases
• Cavity quantum electrodynamics
• Quantum phase transitions
• Bose-Einstein condensates
• Semiclassical methods