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arXiv:2309.06738 · Physical Review Research

Effective field theories and finite-temperature properties of zero-dimensional superradiant quantum phase transitions

Zi-Yong Ge, Heng Fan, Franco Nori

Published May 3, 2024• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The existence of zero-dimensional superradiant quantum phase transitions seems inconsistent with conventional statistical physics. This work clarifies this apparent inconsistency. We demonstrate the corresponding effective field theories and finite-temperature properties of light-matter interacting systems, and show how this zero-dimensional quantum phase transition occurs. We first focus on the Rabi model, which is a minimum model that hosts a superradiant quantum phase transition. With the path-integral method, we derive the imaginary-time action of the photon degrees of freedom. We also define a dynamical critical exponent as the rescaling between the temperature and the photon frequency, and perform dimensional analysis to the effective action. The dynamical critical exponent shows that the effective theory of the Rabi model is a free scalar field, where a true second-order quantum phase transition emerges. These results are also verified by numerical simulations of imaginary-time correlation functions of the order parameter. Furthermore, we also generalize this method to the Dicke model. Our results make the zero-dimensional superradiant quantum phase transition compatible with conventional statistical physics, and pave the way to understand it in the perspective of effective field theories. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.6.023123

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In this paper, we investigate the finite-temperature properties and phase transition of the Dicke model. Converting the atomic pseudo-spin operator to the two-mode Fermi operators, we obtain the partition function in terms of the imaginary-time path integral. The atomic population and average photon number as analytic functions of the atom-photon coupling strength are found from the thermodynamic equilibrium equation, which leads to the stationary state at a finite temperature and is determined by the variation in an extremum-condition of the Euclidean action with respect to the bosonic field. In particular we study the phase transition from normal to superradiation phase at a fixed low-temperature, in which the phase transition is dominated by quantum fluctuations. The phase transition induced by the variation of the atom-photon coupling strength indeed obeys the Landau continuous phase-transition theory, in which the average photon-number can serve as an order parameter with non-zero value that characterizes the superradiation phase. In the zero temperature limit our results recover exactly all those obtained from the quantum phase transition theory at zero temperature. In addition, we discuss the thermodynamic properties and compare the difference between finite-temperature phase transition and zero-temperature quantum phase transition. It is discovered that the average photon-number and mean energy in the low-temperature stationary state coincide with the corresponding values of zero-temperature in the strong coupling region. The entropy of the superradiation phase decays rapidly to zero with the increase of coupling strength.
Recently, a superradiant phase transition first predicted theoretically in the quantum Rabi model (QRM) has been verified experimentally. This further stimulates the interest in the study of the process of phase transition and the nature of the superradiant phase since the fundamental role of the QRM in describing the interaction of light and matter, and more importantly, the QRM contains rich physics deserving further exploration despite its simplicity. Here we propose a scheme consisting of two successive diagonalizations to accurately obtain the ground-state and excited states wavefunctions of the QRM in full parameter regime ranging from weak to deep-strong couplings. Thus, one is able to see how the phase transition occurs and how the photons populate in Fock space of the superradiant phase. We characterize the photon populations by borrowing the distribution concept in random matrix theory and find that the photon population follows a Poissonian-like distribution once the phase transition takes place and further exhibits the statistics of Gaussian unitary ensemble with increasing coupling strength. More interestingly, the photons in the excited states behave even like the statistics of Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. Our results not only deepen understanding on the superradiant phase transition but also provide an insight on the nature of the superradiant phase of the QRM and related models.