Quantum simulation of an extended Dicke model with a magnetic solid
Nicolás Márquez Peraca, Xinwei Li, Jaime M. Moya, Kenji Hayashida, Dasom Kim, Xiaoxuan Ma, Kelly J. Neubauer, Diego Fallas Padilla, C.-L. Huang, Pengcheng Dai, Andriy H. Nevidomskyy, Han Pu, E. Morosan, Shixun Cao, Motoaki Bamba, Junichiro Kono
Abstract The Dicke model describes the cooperative interaction of an ensemble of two-level atoms with a single-mode photonic field and exhibits a quantum phase transition as a function of light–matter coupling strength. Extending this model by incorporating short-range atom–atom interactions makes the problem intractable but is expected to produce new physical phenomena and phases. Here, we simulate such an extended Dicke model using a crystal of ErFeO 3 , where the role of atoms (photons) is played by Er 3+ spins (Fe 3+ magnons). Through terahertz spectroscopy and magnetocaloric effect measurements as a function of temperature and magnetic field, we demonstrated the existence of a novel atomically ordered phase in addition to the superradiant and normal phases that are expected from the standard Dicke model. Further, we elucidated the nature of the phase boundaries in the temperature–magnetic-field phase diagram, identifying both first-order and second-order phase transitions. These results lay the foundation for studying multiatomic quantum optics models using well-characterized many-body solid-state systems.
Abstract The Dicke model describes the cooperative interaction of an ensemble of two-level atoms with a single-mode photonic field and exhibits a quantum phase transition as a function of light–matter coupling strength. Extending this model by incorporating short-range atom–atom interactions makes the problem intractable but is expected to produce new physical phenomena and phases. Here, we simulate such an extended Dicke model using a crystal of ErFeO 3 , where the role of atoms (photons) is played by Er 3+ spins (Fe 3+ magnons). Through terahertz spectroscopy and magnetocaloric effect measurements as a function of temperature and magnetic field, we demonstrated the existence of a novel atomically ordered phase in addition to the superradiant and normal phases that are expected from the standard Dicke model. Further, we elucidated the nature of the phase boundaries in the temperature–magnetic-field phase diagram, identifying both first-order and second-order phase transitions. These results lay the foundation for studying multiatomic quantum optics models using well-characterized many-body solid-state systems.
Present-day experiments have started to couple traditional simulations of ultracold atom experiments with quantum light-fields in cavities. This has provided a wealth of op- portunities to enlarge the number of interaction potentials: cavity mediated long-range interactions compete with kinetic energies, longitudinal fields, short-ranged collisional or magnetic spin-spin interactions. The intracavity many-body lattice models often have to be maintained far from equilibrium through the presence of external driving lasers that help to boost and engineer the various interaction potentials. The steady influx of energy is compensated by a steady stream of energy out of the atom-cavity system for example by photon losses or atomic spontaneous emission. Several experiments have demonstrated that such environments can give rise to new competing quantum phases. \nBut this long-standing ambition to push for models with tailorable interaction potentials can bring with it also considerable challenges in their theoretical description, since sponta- neous symmetry breaking transitions in many body lattice systems coupled to dynamical light-fields with single-photon character occur in the presence of drive and dissipation for the photonic force carriers. This clearly calls for model systems where the above men- tioned interplay of interactions, drive, dissipation and cooperative many-body behaviour can be theoretically studied to provide simple, experimentally verifiable predictions. \nThe Dicke model is, through its simplicity (an exactly solved ferromagnet with infinite range atom-atom interactions mediated by a single cavity mode), an exceptionally well- suited candidate. As the generic model for atom-light interactions, it has been experimen- tally realized in a variety of modern quantum optical systems, highlighting its relevance for present-day research. The Dicke model is also highly versatile itself. It has been extended into the dissipative realm, was promoted to account for multiple optical light modes and was used to describe multiple, coupled single-mode cavity structures. It was adapted to treat spin-selective coupling to a cavity to describe superradiance phase tran- sitions in multi-level atomic systems. Moreover, it was realised in electronic circuits where the dipole coupling of real atoms to single mode fields is replaced by a capacitive cou- pling of artificial atoms to a resonator mode. This illustrates that the Dicke model and its extended variants are ’future-proof’ and continue to be of relevance for fundamental light-matter interactions and for driven-dissipative phase transitions. \nIn this thesis, we investigate magnetic phase transitions in driven-dissipative atomic en- sembles interacting with quantum light. We present three research projects on variants of cooperative radiation of an ensemble of laser driven two-level atoms in a single mode optical cavity, as described by the Dicke model. \nThroughout the chapters 2,3 and 4 that contain the main body of research of this thesis, we investigate phase transitions between non-equilibrium stationary states in engineered quantum-optical systems each of which extends the conventional Dicke model physics. As a starting point, we map the quantum equations of motion onto a set of semiclassical nonlinear stochastic equations and analyse their stationary states and instabilities with master equations for atomic spin and photon mean-field amplitudes. These are used to obtain experimentally relevant parameters such as critical atom-light couplings for phase transitions, phase diagrams and properties of stationary non-equilibrium states in addition to cavity output spectra that identify the imprint of magnetic correlations in the light-field. \nIn chapter 2, we help resolve a discrepancy between earlier experimental investigations of the critical atom-light coupling strength for the superradiance transition in the Dicke model: higher external pumping strengths than theoretically predicted were needed to observe a coherent, superradiant state of the light field in an optical cavity. By including incoherent spontaneous emission of atomic excitations, we extend the dissipative Dicke model to a two loss channel variant containing both photon leakage and atomic decay that reproduces the experimentally observed critical atom-light coupling. \nRecent experiments have started to interface quantum many body lattice models with coherent cavity fields, thereby allowing to realize new quantum phases through competing atom-cavity and atom-atom interactions. In chapter 3, we consider a simplified model for such a set-up where a single quantized mode of the light-field interacts with an ensemble of Rydberg-dressed atoms inside a high finesse optical cavity. This model provides a base case for further studies of quantum magnets in optical cavities. At the heart of this model is a competition of short- (dipolar atom-atom) and long-range (atom-light) interactions at the Hamiltonian level in the presence of both spontaneous emission and photon leak- age through the cavity mirrors. We show that different magnetic phases can coexist with coherent atomic radiation and provide clear experimental signatures to identify the mag- netic structure and intra-cavity dynamics. We suggest an experimental level-scheme for a quantum optical implementation of our model. \nIn chapter 4 we consider a generic, collective decay for many-body excitations in the paradigmatic Dicke model. This extension drastically enriches the dynamics as it induces a bicritical point and a bistable regime dominated by true non-equilibrium fluctuations that induce a dissipative first-order phase transition that can only be resolved by including finite fluctuation corrections with the help of stochastic Langevin equations. We investigate the hysteretic response to time-dependent ramps of the atom-light coupling. Discontinuous first-order phase transitions where metastable states coexist in a hysteresis domain have been investigated in recent dissipative quantum-optical experiments. We review noise- activation far from thermal equilibrium in chapter 5.
We gain quantitative insights on effects of light-matter interactions on correlated quantum matter by quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We introduce a wormhole algorithm for the paradigmatic Dicke-Ising model which combines the light-matter interaction of the Dicke model with Ising interactions. The quantum phase diagrams for ferro- and antiferromagnetic interactions on the chain and the square lattice are determined. The occurring superradiant phase transitions are in the same universality class as the Dicke model, leading to a well-known peculiar finite-size scaling that we elucidate in terms of scaling above the upper critical dimension. For the ferromagnetic case, the transition between the normal and the superradiant phase is of second order with Dicke criticality (first order) for large (small) longitudinal fields separated by a multicritical point. For antiferromagnetic interactions, we establish the light-matter analog of a lattice supersolid with off-diagonal superradiant and diagonal magnetic order and determine the nature of all transition lines. Our achievements allow to quantitatively enter the domain of mesoscopic light-matter systems, which is an increasingly prominent topic at the interface of quantum optics and condensed matter physics.
Traditionally, strong-field physics explores phenomena in laser-driven matter (atoms, molecules, and solids) that cannot be understood by treating the laser field as a small perturbation. Therefore, the presence of an extremely strong external field is usually a prerequisite for observing strong-field phenomena. However, even in the complete absence of an external electromagnetic field, strong-field phenomena can arise when matter strongly couples with the zero-point field of the quantum vacuum state, i.e., fluctuating electromagnetic waves whose expectation value is zero. This can occur in free space where the matter strongly interacts with a continuum of photon modes, but some of the most striking examples of strong-field physics without an external field occur in a cavity setting, in which an ensemble of two-level atoms resonantly interacts with a single photonic mode of vacuum fields, producing vacuum Rabi splitting. In particular, the nature of the matter-vacuum-field coupled system fundamentally changes when the coupling rate (equal to one half of the vacuum Rabi splitting) becomes comparable to, or larger than, the resonance frequency. In this so-called ultrastrong coupling regime, a non-negligible number of photons exist in the ground state of the coupled system. Furthermore, the coupling rate can be cooperatively enhanced (via so-called Dicke cooperativity) when the matter is comprised of a large number of identical two-level particles, and a quantum phase transition is predicted to occur as the coupling rate reaches a critical value. Low-energy electronic or magnetic transitions in many-body condensed matter systems with large dipole moments are ideally suited for searching for these predicted phenomena. Here, we discuss two condensed matter systems that have shown cooperative ultrastrong interactions in the terahertz frequency range: a Landau-quantized two-dimensional electron gas interacting with high-quality-factor cavity photons, and an Er3+ spin ensemble interacting with Fe3+ magnons in ErFeO3.
Dicke model describes a collective interaction between the two-level atoms and the light cavity and has been predicted to show a peculiar quantum phase transition, which is a second-order phase transition from a normal phase (in a weak-coupling strength) to a superradiant phase (in a strong-coupling strength). The model plays an important role in illustrating the quantum ground-state properties of many-body macroscopic quantum states. In the experiment, Dicke quantum phase transition in an open system could be formed by a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. This experiment on the Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in the optical cavity have opened new frontiers, which could combine the cold atoms with quantum optics and makes it possible to enter into the strongly coupled regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics. In strong coupled regime, the atoms exchange the photons many times before spontaneous emission and cavity losses set in. It has become a hot research topic in recent years and plays an important role in many fields of modern physics, such as condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, etc. It can be applied to the manipulation of the geometric phase and entanglement in quantum information and computing. Quantum phase transition has been widely studied for the Dicke model as a typical example. Many different research methods about the mean-field approximation have been used to analyze the ground state properties of the Dicke model. In this paper, we study the ground state properties of two-component Bose-Einstein condensate in a single-mode cavity. Meanwhile, the associated quantum phase transition is described by the spin-coherent-state variational method, whose advantage is that the ground state energy and wave function can be obtained without the thermodynamic limit. By taking the average in the boson coherent state, we obtain an equivalent effective pesudospin Hamiltonian, which will be diagonalized by using the spin coherent state. Finally, we can obtain the energy functional, which is the basics of the variation to obtain the numerical solution of photon number and the expression of the atomic number and the ground state energy. This paper presents a rich phase diagram, which can be manipulated by changing the atom-field coupling imbalance between two components and the atom-field frequency detuning. While in the single-mode Dicke model there exist only the normal phase and the superradiation phase. When the frequency of one component atom is zero or the frequency of the two component atoms are equal in optical cavity, the system returns to the standard Dicke model, in which there occurs the second-order phase transition from the normal phase to the superradiant phase by adjusting the atom-field coupling. In conclusion, we discover that the stimulated radiation comes from the collective state of atomic population inversion, which does not exist in the single-mode Dicke model. Meanwhile, the new stimulated-radiation state S and S, which can only be produced by one component of the atom, are observed in the two-component Bose-Einstein condensates in the single-mode optical cavity. By adjusting the atom-field coupling imbalance and the atom-field frequency detuning (the blue or red detuning), the order of the superradiation state and the stimulated-radiation states can be exchanged between the two components of the atom.
We present quantum phase diagrams for the antiferromagnetic long-range Ising model with a linear coupling to a single bosonic mode on the square and triangular lattice. For zero coupling, the ground-state magnetization forms a devil's staircase structure of magnetization plateaux as a function of a longitudinal field. Apart from a paramagnetic superradiant phase with a finite photon density at strong light-matter couplings, the long-range interactions lead to a plethora of intermediate phases that break the translational symmetry and have a finite photon density at the same time. We apply an adaption of the unit-cell-based mean-field calculations, which captures all possible magnetic unit cells up to a chosen extent. Further, we exploit an exact mapping of the non-superradiant phases to an effective Dicke model to calculate upper bounds for phase transitions towards superradiant phases. Finally, to treat quantum fluctuations in a quantitative fashion, we employ a generalized wormhole quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. We discuss how these three methods are used in a cooperative fashion. In the calculated phase diagrams we see several features arising from the long-range interactions: The devil's staircases of distinct magnetically ordered normal phases and non-trivial magnetically ordered superradiant phases beyond the findings for nearest-neighbor interactions. Examples are a superradiant phase with a three-sublattice magnetic order on the square lattice and the superradiant Wigner crystal with four sites per unit cell on the triangular lattice. We find the transition between normal and superradiant phases with the same (different) magnetic order to be of second order with Dicke universality (first order). Further, between superradiant phases we find first-order phase transitions, besides specially highlighted regimes for which we find indications for second-order behavior.
The superradiant phenomenon, usually described by the Dicke model, is a hallmark of strong light-matter interaction. We explore how matter-matter interactions influence this phenomenon by performing ground-state simulations of Dicke-like models with both isotropic and anisotropic interactions. We find that Ising-type interactions produce two qualitatively distinct phase boundaries, one of which gives rise to an antiferromagnetic-normal phase connected to the superradiant regime via a first-order phase transition. Under anisotropic couplings, we uncover a strongly correlated phase where in-plane spin order coexists with superradiance, exhibiting sublinear scaling of the photon occupation per site and power-law decay of spin correlations. Furthermore, superradiance is strengthened by tuning either isotropic or anisotropic interactions, highlighting the role of intrinsic many-body correlations in shaping light-matter quantum phases.