Boundary-induced Phases in the Dissipative Dicke Lattice Model

TL;DR

This paper explores how boundary conditions significantly affect the superradiant phase transition in the dissipative Dicke lattice model, revealing new phases in finite systems that differ from infinite lattice behavior.

Contribution

It demonstrates the crucial influence of boundary effects on stationary phases in dissipative lattice models, highlighting phenomena unique to finite systems with open boundaries.

Findings

Open boundary conditions lead to diverse superradiant phases with broken translational symmetry.

Boundary effects cause qualitative differences from infinite lattice systems.

Results are relevant for near-term quantum optics and circuit QED experiments.

Abstract

The superradiant phase transition in the dissipative Dicke lattice model, driven by on-site collective atom-photon interactions and inter-site photon hopping, is a cornerstone of nonequilibrium quantum many-body physics. However, little is still known about the influence of boundaries in experimental achievable systems of finite size. Here we investigate the dissipative superradiant phase transition in the Dicke lattice model with a small number of sites and reveal a striking sensitivity of this model to the nature of the boundary conditions. Specifically, we find that under open boundary conditions a whole zoo of superradiant phases with broken translational symmetry appears, which is not observed in the corresponding infinite lattice system. Our results demonstrate the crucial influence of boundary effects on the stationary phases of dissipative lattice models, which offers intriguing new opportunities for studying these phenomena in near term experimental realizations of such models in quantum optics and circuit QED.