Chirally Frustrated Superradiant Phases in a Jaynes-Cummings Trimer

TL;DR

This paper explores how complex hopping and synthetic gauge fields induce frustrated, chiral superradiant phases in a Jaynes-Cummings trimer, revealing novel symmetry-breaking phenomena and unidirectional photon flow.

Contribution

It introduces the first analytic description of chiral frustrated superradiant phases in a JC trimer with synthetic gauge fields and maps their phase diagram.

Findings

Identification of a chirally frustrated superradiant phase

Broken chiral and translational symmetries observed

Unidirectional photon flow demonstrated

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of frustrated quantum phases in a Jaynes-Cummings (JC) trimer with complex hopping amplitudes between the cavities, which represents the smallest frustrated unit in light-matter systems. The complex hopping amplitudes that can be engineered via synthetic gauge fields introduce chiral effects and geometric frustration into the system. We obtain analytic solutions in the semiclassical limit and map out the phase diagram of this model, featuring one normal and three distinct superradiant phases. Among these phases, a chirally frustrated superradiant phase emerges, characterized by broken chiral and translational symmetries and unidirectional photon flow. These results reveal how frustration and symmetry breaking can arise in JC systems with synthetic gauge fields and ultrastrong coupling.