Nonequilibrium photonic transport and phase transition in an array of optical cavities

Abstract

We characterize photonic transport in a boundary driven array of nonlinear optical cavities. We find that the output field suddenly drops when the chain length is increased beyond a threshold. After this threshold a highly chaotic and unstable regime emerges, which marks the onset of a super-diffusive photonic transport. We show the scaling of the threshold with pump intensity and nonlinearity. Finally, we address the competition of disorder and nonlinearity presenting a diffusive-insulator phase transition.

Linked cluster expansions for open quantum systems on a lattice

“…We stress that there are no restrictions in the limits of applicability of this approach to different scenarios for homogenous systems, which can be straightforwardly extended to the case of generic non-Markovian master equations and/or nonequilibrium states ρ(t). Therefore, boundary-driven systems 16,[18][19][20]69 and disordered lattices 70 do not fit within this framework.…”

“…Recently, a large body of theoretical works has been devoted to the investigation of the collective behavior emerging in dynamical response 12 , many-body spectroscopy [13][14][15] , transport [16][17][18][19][20] , as well as stationary properties. In the latter context, a careful engineering of the coupling between the system and the environment can stabilize interesting many-body phases in the steady state 21,22 .…”

Numerical linked-cluster expansion for the dissipative XYZ model on a triangular lattice

“…In contrast to the equilibrium case, the properties of the dissipative system are featured by the evolved steady state rather than the ground state of the Hamiltonian. Recently, a large body of work has be devoted to investigate the properties of the dissipative quantum many-body systems including the dynamics [2][3][4][5][6], transport properties [7][8][9][10][11], steady-state phases [12][13][14][15]16] and phase transitions [17][18][19][20][21], quantum states engineering [22][23][24], as well as the possible applications in quantum sensing [25,26]. Thanks to the experiment progress, dissipative phase transitions have been observed in circuit QED arrays [27] and ensembles of Rydberg atoms [28,29].…”

Collective dynamics of inhomogeneously broadened emitters coupled to an optical cavity with narrow linewidth

“…Inhomogeneous systems, however, also offer the possibility for qubit encoding in frequency space [14][15][16] for multi-mode quantum memories and they sometimes give rise to interesting physics like synchronization [27], quantum phase transition [28][29][30][31][32], many body localization [33] etc. Synchronization is an old classical phenomenon and has been reported in plethora of systems in diverse fields ranging from optomechanical arrays [34,35], cold atomic ensembles [36] in quantum optics [36] to fireflies and pendula in non-linear dynamics [37].…”