Collective effects, such as Dicke superradiant emission, can enhance the performance of a quantum device. Here, we study the heat current flowing between a cold and a hot bath through an ensemble of $N$ qubits, which are collectively coupled to the thermal baths. We find a regime where the collective coupling leads to a quadratic scaling of the heat current with $N$ in a finite-size scenario. Conversely, when approaching the thermodynamic limit, we prove that the collective scenario exhibits a parametric enhancement over the non-collective case. We then consider the presence of a third uncontrolled {\it parasitic} bath, interacting locally with each qubit, that models unavoidable couplings to the external environment. Despite having a non-perturbative effect on the steady-state currents, we show that the collective enhancement is robust to such an addition. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of realizing such a Dicke heat valve with superconducting circuits. Our findings indicate that in a minimal realistic experimental setting with two superconducting qubits, the collective advantage offers an enhancement of approximately $10\%$ compared to the non-collective scenario.
A Reply to the Comment by C. Ciuti and P. Nataf [arXiv:1112.0986v1] on our Letter "Superradiant Phase Transitions and the Standard Description of Circuit QED" [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 113602 (2011)].
We show that in the strong coupling linear regime, the dispersive opto-mechanical Hamiltonian system can undergo a Dicke-Hepp-Lieb superradiant phase transition with two critical points. The higher critical point is the usual second order Dicke superradiant phase transition while the lower critical point is a new effect showing similarity to the usual Dicke superradiance. We also show that the mechanical mode near its quantum ground state completely decouples from the optical mode and the optical mode shows similarity to the Bogoluibov like excitations.
The controllability of current quantum technologies allows to implement spin-boson models where two-photon couplings are the dominating terms of light-matter interaction. In this case, when the coupling strength becomes comparable with the characteristic frequencies, a spectral collapse can take place, i.e. the discrete system spectrum can collapse into a continuous band. Here, we analyze the thermodynamic limit of the two-photon Dicke model, which describes the interaction of an ensemble of qubits with a single bosonic mode. We find that there exists a parameter regime where two-photon intera…
We investigate the equilibrium behaviour of a superconducting circuit QED system containing a large number of artificial atoms. It is shown that the currently accepted standard description of circuit QED via an effective model fails in an important aspect: it predicts the possibility of a superradiant quantum phase transition, even though a full microscopic treatment reveals that a no-go theorem for such phase transitions known from cavity QED applies to circuit QED systems as well. We generalize the no-go theorem to the case of (artificial) atoms with many energy levels and thus make it more …
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…
We calculate the transmission spectrum of a superconducting circuit realization of the Dicke model and identify spectroscopic features that can serve as signatures of the superradiant phase. In particular, we calculate the resonance frequencies of the system as functions of the bias term, which is usually absent in studies on the Dicke model but is commonly present in superconducting qubit circuits. To avoid over-complicating the proposed circuit, we assume a fixed coupling strength. This situation precludes the possibility of observing signatures of the phase transition by varying the couplin…
Using a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian approach to open systems, we study the interplay of disorder and superradiance in a one- and three-dimensional Anderson model. Analyzing the complex eigenvalues of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, a transition to a superradiant regime is shown to occur. As an effect of openness the structure of eigenstates undergoes a strong change in the superradiant regime: we show that the sensitivity to disorder of the superradiant and the subradiant subspaces is very different; superradiant states remain delocalized as disorder increases, while subradiant states are sensiti…
We present the non-equilibrium phase diagram of a model which can demonstrate both Dicke--Hepp--Lieb superradiance and regular lasing by varying the coherent and incoherent driving terms. We find that the regions in the phase diagram corresponding to superradiance and standard lasing are always separated by a normal region. We analyse the behaviour of the system using a combination of exact numerics based on permutation symmetry of the density matrix for small to intermediate numbers of molecules, and second order cumulant equations for large numbers of molecules. We find that the nature of th…
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…
This paper is devoted to energy-spectral analysis for the system of a two-level atom coupled with photons in a cavity. It is shown that the Dicke-type energy level crossings take place when the atom-cavity interaction of the system undergoes changes between the weak coupling regime and the strong one. Using the phenomenon of the crossings we develop the idea of cavity-induced atom cooling proposed by the group of Ritsch, and we lay mathematical foundations of a possible mechanism for another superradiant cooling in addition to that proposed by Domokos and Ritsch. The process of our superradian…
We apply the time-delayed Pyragas control scheme to the dissipative Dicke model via a modulation of the atom-field-coupling. The feedback creates an infinite sequence of non-equilibrium phases with fixed points and limit cycles in the primary superradiant regime. We analyse this Hopf bifurcation scenario as a function of delay time and feedback strength, and determine analytical conditions for the phase boundaries.
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 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 …
Hybrid photonic-plasmonic nanostructures allow one to engineer coupling of quantum emitters and cavity modes accounting for the direct coherent and environment mediated dissipative pathways. Using generalized plasmonic Dicke model, we explore the non-equilibrium phase diagram with respect to these interactions. The analysis shows that their interplay results in the extension of the superradiant and regular lasing states to the dissipative coupling regime and an emergent lasing phase without population inversion having boundary with the superradiant and normal states. Calculated photon emission…
We report the experimental observation of superradiant emission emanating from an elongated dense ensemble of laser cooled two-level atoms, with a radial extent smaller than the transition wavelength. In the presence of a strong driving laser, we observe that the system is superradiant along its symmmetry axis. This occurs even though the driving laser is orthogonal to the superradiance direction. This superradiance modifies the spontaneous emission, and, resultantly, the Rabi oscillations. We also investigate Dicke superradiance in the emission of an almost fully-inverted system as a function…
In this paper, we investigate the non-equilibrium quantum phases of the two-atom Dicke model, which can be realized in a two species Bose-Einstein condensate interacting with a single light mode in an optical cavity. Apart from the usual non-equilibrium normal and inverted phases, a non-equilibrium mixed phase is possible which is a combination of normal and inverted phase. A new kind of quantum phase transition is predicted from non-superradiant mixed phase to the superradiant phase which can be achieved by tuning the two different atom-photon couplings. We also show that a quantum phase tran…
In 1954, Dicke predicted that a system of quantum emitters confined to a subwavelength volume would produce a superradiant burst. For such a burst to occur, the emitters must be in the special Dicke state with zero dipole moment. We show that a superradiant burst may also arise for non-Dicke initial states with nonzero dipole moment. Both for Dicke and non-Dicke initial states, superradiance arises due to a decrease in the dispersion of the quantum phase of the emitter state. For non-Dicke states, the quantum phase is related to the phase of long-period envelopes which modulate the oscillation…
In the dissipative quantum dynamics of a mesoscopic aggregate of excited two level systems (atoms) coupled to a single resonance mode of a cavity, two physical phenomena associated with superradiance appear. A pronounced emission peak on short time scales is related to the known superradiant burst of excited atoms cooperatively radiating into free space. It is followed by relaxation to a stationary state of the composite system such that for sufficiently large atom-field coupling a strongly correlated state emerges. The crossover to this state can be interpreted as the precursor of the transit…
The Dicke model of cavity quantum electrodynamics is approximately realized in condensed matter when the cyclotron transition of a two-dimensional electron gas is nearly resonant with a cavity photon mode. We point out that in the strong coupling limit the Dicke model of cavity cyclotron resonance must be supplemented by a term that is quadratic in the cavity photon field and suppresses the model's transition to a super-radiant state. We develop the theory of graphene cavity cyclotron resonance and show that the quadratic term, which is absent in graphene's low-energy Dirac model Hamiltonian, …
We calculate the field eigenmodes of the superradiant emission from an ensemble of $N$ two-level atoms. While numerical techniques are effective due to the symmetry of the problem, we develop also an analytical method to approximates the modes in the limit of a large number of emitters. We find that Dicke superradiant emission is restricted to a small number of modes, with a little over 90\% of the photons emitted in a single dominant mode.
We demonstrate the emergence of a non-equilibrium superradiant phase in the dissipative Rabi-Dicke model. This phase is characterized by a photonic steady state that oscillates with a frequency close to the cavity frequency, in contrast to the constant photonic steady state of the equilibrium superradiant phase in the Dicke model. We relate this superradiant phase to the population inversion of Floquet states by introducing a Schwinger representation of the driven two-level systems in the cavity. This inversion is depleted near Floquet energies that are resonant with the cavity frequency to su…
In a view of recent proposals for the realization of anisotropic light-matter interaction in such platforms as (i) non-stationary or inductively and capacitively coupled superconducting qubits, (ii) atoms in crossed fields and (iii) semiconductor heterostructures with spin-orbital interaction, the concept of generalized Dicke model, where coupling strengths of rotating wave and counter-rotating wave terms are unequal, has attracted great interest. For this model, we study photon fluctuations in the critical region of normal-to-superradiant phase transition when both the temperatures and number…
We report a time-resolved study of collective emission in dense ensembles of two-level atoms. We compare, on the same sample, the build-up of superradiance and subradiance from the ensemble when driven by a strong laser. This allows us to measure the dynamics of the population of superradiant and subradiant states as a function of time. In particular we demonstrate the build up in time of subradiant states through the superradiant dynamics. This illustrates the dynamics of the many-body density matrix of superradiant ensembles of two-level atoms when departing from the ideal conditions of Dick…
We address characterization of many-body superradiant systems and establish a fundamental connection between quantum criticality and the possibility of locally estimating the coupling constant, i.e extracting its value by probing only a portion of the whole system. In particular, we consider Dicke-like superradiant systems made of an ensmble of two-level atoms interacting with a single-mode radiation field at zero effective temperature, and address estimation of the coupling by measurements performed only on radiation. At first, we obtain analytically the Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) and s…
We investigate the finite-size Dicke model with photon leakage. It is shown that the symmetry breaking states, which are characterized by non-vanishing $\langle \hat{a} \rangle \neq 0$ and correspond to the ground states in the superradiant phase in the thermodynamic limit, are stable, while the eigenstates of the isolated finite-size Dicke Hamiltonian conserve parity symmetry. We introduce and analyze an effective master equation that describes the dynamics of a pair of the symmetry breaking states that are the degenerate lowest energy eigenstates in the superradiant region with photon leakag…
Dicke superrandiance is a cooperative phenomenon which arises from the collective coupling of an ensemble of atoms to the electromagnetic radiation. Here we discuss the quantifying of quantum coherence for the Dicke model of superradiance in the mean-field approximation. We found the single-atom $l_1$-norm of coherence is given by the square root of the normalized average intensity of radiation emitted by the superradiant system. This validates quantum coherence as a useful figure of merit towards the understanding of superradiance phenomenon in the mean-field approach. In particular, this res…
We investigate realistic experimental conditions under which the collective Dicke model can be implemented in ion-cavity QED context. We show how ideal subradiance and superradiance can be observed and we propose an experiment to generate entanglement exploiting the existence of the subradiant state. We explore the conditions to achieve optimal entanglement generation and we show that they are reachable with current experimental technology.
We present theoretical results for superradiance, i.e. the collective coherent decay of a radiating system, in semiconductor structures. An optically active region can become superradiant if a strong magnetic field is applied. Pumping of electrons and holes at a rate T through coupling to external `reservoirs' leads to a novel kind of oscillations with frequency $\sim \sqrt{T}$.}
The Dicke model describes the coupling between a quantized cavity field and a large ensemble of two-level atoms. When the number of atoms tends to infinity, this model can undergo a transition to a superradiant phase, belonging to the mean-field Ising universality class. The superradiant transition was first predicted for atoms in thermal equilibrium and was recently realized with a quantum simulator made of atoms in an optical cavity, subject to both dissipation and driving. In this Progress Report, we offer an introduction to some theoretical concepts relevant to the Dicke model, reviewing 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…
Circuit QED on a chip has become a powerful platform for simulating complex many-body physics. In this report, we realize a Dicke-Ising model with an antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor spin-spin interaction in circuit QED with a superconducting qubit array. We show that this system exhibits a competition between the collective spin-photon interaction and the antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor spin-spin interaction, and then predict four quantum phases, including: a paramagnetic normal phase, an antiferromagnetic normal phase, a paramagnetic superradiant phase, and an antiferromagnetic superrad…
In order to examine whether or not the quantum phase transition of Dicke type exists in realistic systems, we revisit the model setup of the superconducting circuit QED from a microscopic many-body perspective based on the BCS theory with pseudo-spin presentation. By deriving the Dicke model with the correct charging terms from the minimum coupling principle, it is shown that the circuit QED system can exhibit superradiant quantum phase transition in the limit N\rightarrow\infty. The critical point could be reached at easiness by adjusting the extra parameters, the ratio of Josephson capacitan…
We study the semiclassical limit of the anisotropic two-photon Dicke model with a dissipative bosonic field and describe its rich nonlinear dynamics. Besides normal and 'superradiant'-like phases, the presence of localized fixed points reflects the spectral collapse of the closed-system Hamiltonian. Through Hopf bifurcations of superradiant and normal fixed points, limit cycles are formed in certain regions of parameters. We also identify a pole-flip transition induced by anisotropy and a region of chaotic dynamics, which appears from a cascade of period-doubling bifurcations. In the chaotic r…
The existence of quantum tricriticality and exotic phases are found in a Dicke triangle (TDT) where three cavities, each one containing an ensemble of three-level atoms, are connected to each other through the action of an artificial magnetic field. The conventional superradiant phase (SR) is connected to the normal phase through first- and second-order boundaries, with tricritical points located at the intersection of such boundaries. Apart from the SR phase, a chiral superradiant (CSR) phase is found by tuning the artificial magnetic field. This phase is characterized by a nonzero photon cur…
The Dicke model consisting of an ensemble of two-state atoms interacting with a single quantized mode of the electromagnetic field exhibits a zero-temperature phase transition at a critical value of the dipole coupling strength. We propose a scheme based on multilevel atoms and cavity-mediated Raman transitions to realise an effective Dicke system operating in the phase transition regime. Output light from the cavity carries signatures of the critical behavior which is analyzed for the thermodynamic limit where the number of atoms is very large.
In cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED), the interaction between an atomic transition and the cavity field is measured by the vacuum Rabi frequency $Ω_0$. The analogous term "circuit QED" has been introduced for Josephson junctions, because superconducting circuits behave as artificial atoms coupled to the bosonic field of a resonator. In the regime with $Ω_0$ comparable to the two-level transition frequency, "superradiant" quantum phase transitions for the cavity vacuum have been predicted, e.g. within the Dicke model. Here, we prove that if the time-independent light-matter Hamiltonian is co…
We present simulations of the superradiant dynamics of ensembles of atoms in the presence of collective and individual atomic decay processes. We unravel the density matrix with Monte-Carlo wave-functions and identify the quantum jumps in a reduced Dicke state basis, which reflects the permutation symmetry of the identical atoms. While the number of density matrix elements in the Dicke representation increases polynomially with atom number, the quantum jump dynamics populates only a single Dicke state at the time and thus efficient simulations can be carried out for tens of thousands of atoms.…
We study the Husimi distribution of the ground state in the Dicke model of field-matter interactions to visualize the quantum phase transition, from normal to superradiant, in phase-space. We follow an exact numerical and variational analysis, without making use of the usual Holstein-Primakoff approximation. We find that Wehrl entropy of the Husimi distribution provides an indicator of the sharp change of symmetry trough the critical point. Additionally, we note that the zeros of the Husimi distribution characterize the Dicke model quantum phase transition.
