# Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the laser transition

## TL;DR

This paper explores spontaneous symmetry breaking in laser systems, demonstrating that in the lasing phase, anomalous averages persist under certain scaling limits, offering a new way to diagnose lasing beyond traditional coherence measures.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of symmetry breaking in laser transitions, linking it to anomalous averages and scaling limits, expanding understanding of laser phase transitions.

## Key findings

- Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs in the lasing phase.
- Anomalous averages persist in the scaling limit for lasing.
- Robust anomalous averages can diagnose lasing more effectively than traditional methods.

## Abstract

In analogy with equilibrium phase transitions, we address the problem of the instability to symmetry-breaking perturbations of systems undergoing a laser transition. The symmetry in question is the $U(1)$ invariance with respect to a phase factor, and the perturbation is a coherent field $E$, coupled to the exciton. At the rate equation level we analyze first the case of a cavity containing a single, two-level emitter, and then a chain of such cavities interacting by photon hopping processes. In both cases spontaneous symmetry breaking takes place when the system is in the lasing phase. For the laser transition, the analogue of the thermodynamic limit is the scaling limit of vanishing cavity loss and light-matter coupling, $\kappa \to 0$, $g \to 0$, so that $g^2/\kappa$ remains finite. We show that in the lasing regime anomalous averages persist in the $E \to 0$ limit, provided that the scaling limit is performed first. Lasing diagnosis based on robust anomalous averages is compared numerically with the familiar coherence criterion $g^{(2)}(0)=1$, and the advantages of the former are discussed.