Signatures of the super fluid-insulator phase transition in laser driven dissipative nonlinear cavity arrays

TL;DR

This paper investigates how driven, dissipative nonlinear cavity arrays exhibit a phase transition from Mott-insulator-like to superfluid states, with potential for experimental detection via photon coherence measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field analysis of non-equilibrium photon dynamics showing phase transition behavior in driven dissipative cavity arrays, highlighting the impact of photon loss on critical tunneling.

Findings

Phase transition from Mott-insulator-like to superfluid regime identified.

Critical tunneling rate increases with photon loss rate.

Second-order coherence can map the phase diagram without thermalization.

Abstract

We analyze the non-equilibrium dynamics of a gas of interacting photons in an array of coupled dissipative nonlinear cavities driven by a pulsed external coherent field. Using a mean-field approach, we show that the system exhibits a phase transition from a Mott-insulator-like to a superfluid regime. For a given single-photon nonlinearity, the critical value of the photon tunneling rate at which the phase transition occurs increases with the increasing photon loss rate. We checked the robustness of the transition by showing its insensitivity to the initial state prepared by the the pulsed excitation. We find that the second-order coherence of cavity emission can be used to determine the phase diagram of an optical many-body system without the need for thermalization.