We show that the low-temperature phase transition in ErFeO3 that occurs at a critical temperature of ~ 4 K can be described as a magnonic version of the superradiant phase transition (SRPT). The role of photons in the quantum-optical SRPT is played by Fe magnons, while that of two-level atoms is played by Er spins. Our spin model, which is reduced to an extended Dicke model, takes into account the short-range, direct exchange interactions between Er spins in addition to the long-range Er-Er interactions mediated by Fe magnons. By using realistic parameters determined by recent terahertz magnetospectroscopy and magnetization experiments, we demonstrate that it is the cooperative, ultrastrong coupling between Er spins and Fe magnons that causes the phase transition. This work thus proves ErFeO3 to be a unique system that exhibits a SRPT in thermal equilibrium, in contrast to previous observations of laser-driven non-equilibrium SRPTs.
Superradiant phase transition in cavity magnonics via Floquet engineering
School of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学物理学院）；Interdisciplinary Research Center of Quantum and Photoelectric Information, and Anhui Research Center of Semiconductor Industry Generic Technology, Chizhou University（池州大学量子与光电信息交叉研究中心及安徽省半导体产业通用技术研究中心）；School of Physics and Electronic Information, Yunnan Normal University（云南师范大学物理与电子信息学院）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Micro-Nano Quantum Chips and Quantum Control（浙江省微纳量子芯片与量子控制重点实验室）
The ground state of the photon-matter coupled system described by the Dicke model is found to be perfectly squeezed at the quantum critical point of the superradiant phase transition (SRPT). In the presence of the counter-rotating photon-atom coupling, the ground state is analytically expressed as a two-mode squeezed vacuum in the basis of photons and atomic collective excitations. The variance of a quantum fluctuation in the two-mode basis vanishes at the SRPT critical point, with its conjugate fluctuation diverging, ideally satisfying the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
We study the parity-symmetry-breaking quantum phase transition (QPT) in a cavity magnonic system driven by a parametric field, where the magnons in a ferrimagnetic yttrium-iron-garnet sphere strongly couple to a microwave cavity. With appropriate parameters, this cavity magnonic system can exhibit a rich phase diagram, including the parity-symmetric phase, parity-symmetry-broken phase, and bistable phase. When increasing the drive strength beyond a critical threshold, the cavity magnonic system undergoes either a first- or second-order nonequilibrium QPT from the parity-symmetric phase with mi…
We develop a stochastic mean-field theory to describe active frequency measurements of pulsed superradiant emission, studied in recent experiments with strontium-87 atoms trapped in an optical lattice inside an optical cavity [M. Norcia, et al., Phys. Rev. X 8, 21036 (2018)]. Our theory reveals the intriguing dynamics of atomic ensembles with multiple transition frequencies, and it reproduces the superradiant beats signal, noisy power spectra, and frequency uncertainty in remarkable agreement with the experiments. Moreover, by reducing the number of atoms, elongating the superradiant pulses an…
We prove, by means of a unified treatment, that the superradiant phase transitions of Dicke and classical oscillator limits of simple light-matter models are indeed of the same type. We show that the mean-field approximation is exact in both cases, and compute the structure and location of the transitions in parameter space. We extend this study to a fuller range of models, paying special attention to symmetry considerations. We uncover general features of the phase structure in the space of parameters of these models.
We investigate the universally non-equilibrium dynamics of superradiant phase transition in the anisotropic quantum Rabi model. By introducing position and momentum operators, we obtain the ground states and their excitation gaps for both normal and superradiant phases via perturbation theory. We analytically extract the critical exponents from the excitation gap and the diverging length scale near the critical point, and find that the critical exponents are independent upon the anisotropy ratio. Moreover, by simulating the real-time dynamics across the critical point, we numerically extract t…
We investigate the possibility of a Dicke-type superradiant phase transition of an atomic gas with an extended model which takes into account the short-range depolarizing interactions between atoms approaching each other as close as the atomic size scale, which interaction appears in a regularized electric-dipole picture of the QED of atoms. By using a mean field model, we find that a critical density does indeed exist, though the atom-atom contact interaction shifts it to a higher value than it can be obtained from the bare Dicke-model. We argue that the system, at the critical density, trans…
We theoretically investigate the quantum phase transition in the collective systems of qubits in a high-quality cavity, which is driven by a squeezed light. We show that the squeezed light induced symmetry breaking can result in quantum phase transition without the ultrastrong coupling requirement. Using the standard mean field theory, we derive the condition of the quantum phase transition. Surprisingly, we show that there exists a tricritical point where the first- and second-order phase transitions meet. With specific atom-cavity coupling strengths, both the first- and second-order phase tr…
The analysis of single-mode photon fluctuations and their counting statistics at the superradiant phase transition is presented. The study concerns the equilibrium Dicke model in a regime where the Rabi frequency, related to a coupling of the photon mode with a finite-number qubit environment, plays a role of the transition's control parameter. We use the effective Matsubara action formalism based on the representation of Pauli operators as bilinear forms with complex and Majorana fermions. Then, we address fluctuations of superradiant order parameter and quasiparticles. The average photon num…
We in this paper derive the analytical expressions of ground-state energy, average photon-number, and the atomic population by means of the spin-coherent-state variational method for arbitrary number of atoms in an optomechanical cavity. It is found that the existence of mechanical oscil- lator does not affect the phase boundary between the normal and superradiant phases. However, the superradiant phase collapses by the resonant damping of the oscillator when the atom-field coupling increases to a so-called turning point. As a consequence the system undergoes at this point an additional phase …
Although the oscillator strength sum rule forbids the phase transition in ideal non-interacting two-level atoms systems, we present the possibility of the quantum phase transition in the coupled two-level atoms in a cavity. The system undergoes the superradiant phase transition in the thermodynamics limit and this transition is account for the atom-atom attractive interaction, exhibiting a violation of the sum rule. The bosonic coherent state technique has been adopted to locate the quantum critical point accurately in the finite-size system. We predict the existence of the superadiant phase t…
Level crossings and superradiant quantum phase transition for a two-qutrit quantum Rabi model
University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa（蓬塔格罗萨州立大学）；CNR-IMM, UoS Università（意大利国家研究委员会材料研究所，大学小组）；INFN Sez. Catania（意大利国家核物理研究所卡塔尼亚分部）；University of Palermo（巴勒莫大学）；St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia（索非亚圣克利门特奥赫里德斯基大学）
We analyse the thermodynamic properties of a generalised Dicke model, i.e. a collection of three-level systems interacting with two bosonic modes. We show that at finite temperatures the system undergoes first-order phase transitions only, which is in contrast to the zero-temperature case where a second-order phase transition exist as well. We discuss the free energy and prominent expectation values. The limit of vanishing temperature is discussed as well.
We demonstrate quantum signatures of deterministic nonlinear dynamics in the transition to superradiance of a generalized open Dicke model with different coupling strengths for the co- and counter-rotating light-matter interaction terms. A first-order phase transition to coexisting normal and superradiant phases is observed, corresponding with the emergence of switching dynamics between these two phases, driven by quantum fluctuations. We show that this phase coexistence gives rise to a hysteresis loop also for the quantum mechanical system. Additionally, a transition to a superradiant oscilla…
Collectivity in ensembles of atoms gives rise to effects like super- and subradiance. While superradiance is well studied and experimentally accessible, subradiance remains elusive since it is difficult to track experimentally as well as theoretically. Here we present a new type of phase transition in the resonantly driven, open Dicke model that leads to a deterministic generation of subradiant states. At the transition the system switches from a predominantly superradiant to a predominantly subradiant state. Clear experimental signatures for the effect are presented and entanglement propertie…
Nonreciprocal superradiant quantum phase transition induced by the magnon Kerr effect
School of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学物理学院）；Department of Physics, Wenzhou University（温州大学物理系）；International Quantum Academy, Shenzhen（深圳量子研究院）
We demonstrate the existence of finite-system multicriticality in a qubit-boson model where biased qubits collectively coupled to a single-mode bosonic field. The interplay between biases and boson-qubit coupling produces a rich phase diagram showing multiple superradiant phases and phase boundaries of different orders. In particular, multiple phases can become indistinguishable in appropriate bias configurations, which is the signature of multicriticality. A series of universality classes characterizing these multicritical points are identified. Moreover, we present a trapped-ion realization …
Frustration occurs when a system cannot find a lowest-energy configuration due to conflicting constraints. We show that a frustrated superradiant phase transition occurs when the ground-state superradiance of cavity fields due to local light-matter interactions cannot simultaneously minimize the positive photon hopping energies. We solve the Dicke trimer model on a triangle motif with both negative and positive hopping energies and show that the latter results in a six-fold degenerate ground-state manifold in which the translational symmetry is spontaneously broken. In the frustrated superradi…
We theoretically study the superradiant phase transition (SPT) in an indirect Rabi model, where both a two-level system and a single mode bosonic field couple to an auxiliary bosonic field. We find that the indirect spin-field coupling induced by the virtual excitation of the auxiliary field can allow the occurrence of a SPT at a critical point, and the influence of the so-called $A^2$ term in the normal Rabi model is naturally avoided. In the large detuning regime, we present the analytical expression of quantum critical point in terms of the original system parameters. The critical atom-fiel…
We introduce a class of quantum optical Hamiltonian characterized by three-body couplings, and propose a circuit-QED scheme based on state-of-the-art technology that implements the considered model. Unlike two-body light-matter interactions, this three-body coupling Hamiltonian is exclusively composed of terms which do not conserve the particle number. We explore the three-body ultrastrong coupling regime, showing the emergence of a superradiant phase transition which is of first order, is characterized by the breaking of a $\mathbb{Z}_2\times \mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry and has a strongly non-Gaus…
Superradiant phase transition represents an important quantum phenomenon that shows the collective excitations based on the coupling between atoms and cavity modes. The spin-orbit coupling is another quantum effect which induced from the interaction of the atom internal degrees of freedom and momentum of center-of-mass. In this work, we consider the cavity assisted dynamical spin-orbit coupling which comes from the combination of these two effects. It can induce a series of interesting quantum phenomena, such as the flat spectrum and the singularity of the excitation energy spectrum around the…
General phase diagram features of superradiant phase transitions
Hunan Key Laboratory for Micro-Nano Energy Materials and Devices and School of Physics and Optoelectronics, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学物理与光电工程学院）；Department of Electronic Science, College of Big Data and Information Engineering, Guizhou University（贵州大学大数据与信息工程学院）
The Dicke model and Rabi model can undergo phase transitions from the normal phase to the superradiant phase at the same boundary, which can be accurately determined using some approximated approaches. The underlying mechanism for this coincidence is still unclear and the universality class of these two models is elusive. Here we prove this phase transition exactly using the path-integral approach based on the faithful Schwinger fermion representation, and give a unified phase boundary condition for these models. We demonstrate that at the phase boundary, the fluctuation of the bosonic field i…
Superradiant phase transition (SPT) in thermal equilibrium, as a fundamental concept bridging the statistical physics and electrodynamics, can offer the key resources for quantum information science. Notwithstanding its fundamental and practical significances, equilibrium SPT has never been observed in experiments since the first proposal in the 1970s. Furthermore, the existence of equilibrium SPT in the cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) systems is still subject of ongoing debates, due to the no-go theorem induced by the so-called A2 term. Based on the platform of nuclear magnetic resonance…
Strong interaction of a system of quantum emitters (e.g., two-level atoms) with electromagnetic field induces specific correlations in the system accompanied by a drastic insrease of emitted radiation (superradiation or superfluorescence). Despite the fact that since its prediction this phenomenon was subject to a vigorous experimental and theoretical research, there remain open question, in particular, concerning the possibility of a first order phase transition to the superradiant state from the vacuum state. In systems of natural and charge-based artificial atome this transition is prohibit…
