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Physical Review A

No singularities in observables at the phase transition in the Dicke model

Octavio Castaños, Eduardo Nahmad-Achar, Ramón López–Peña, Jorge G. Hirsch

Published May 4, 2011• 68 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Dicke Hamiltonian describes the simplest quantum system with atoms interacting with photons: $N$ two-level atoms inside a perfectly reflecting cavity, which allows only one electromagnetic mode. It has also been successfully employed to describe superconducting circuits that behave as artificial atoms coupled to a resonator. The system exhibits a transition to a superradiant phase at zero temperature. When the interaction strength reaches its critical value, both the number of photons and atoms in excited states in the cavity, together with their fluctuations, exhibit a sudden increase from zero. By employing symmetry-adapted coherent states, it is shown that these properties scale with the number of atoms, their reported divergences at the critical point represent the limit when this number goes to infinity, and, in this limit, they remain divergent in the superradiant phase. Analytical expressions are presented for all observables of interest, for any number of atoms. Comparisons with exact numerical solutions strongly support the results.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.83.051601

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The Dicke Hamiltonian describes the simplest quantum system with atoms interacting with photons: NNN two-level atoms inside a perfectly reflecting cavity, which allows only one electromagnetic mode. It has also been successfully employed to describe superconducting circuits that behave as artificial atoms coupled to a resonator. The system exhibits a transition to a superradiant phase at zero temperature. When the interaction strength reaches its critical value, both the number of photons and atoms in excited states in the cavity, together with their fluctuations, exhibit a sudden increase from zero. By employing symmetry-adapted coherent states, it is shown that these properties scale with the number of atoms, their reported divergences at the critical point represent the limit when this number goes to infinity, and, in this limit, they remain divergent in the superradiant phase. Analytical expressions are presented for all observables of interest, for any number of atoms. Comparisons with exact numerical solutions strongly support the results.
The Dicke Hamiltonian describes the simplest quantum system with atoms interacting with photons: N two level atoms inside a perfectly reflecting cavity which allows only one electromagnetic mode. It has also been successfully employed to describe superconducting circuits which behave as artificial atoms coupled to a resonator. The system exhibits a transition to a superradiant phase at zero temperature. When the interaction strength reaches its critical value, both the number of photons and of atoms in excited states in the cavity, together with their fluctuations, exhibit a sudden increase from zero. Employing symmetry-adapted coherent states it is shown that these properties scale with the number of atoms, that their reported divergences at the critical point represent the limit when this number goes to infinity, and that in this limit they remain divergent in the superradiant phase. Analytical expressions are presented for all observables of interest, for any number of atoms. Comparisons with exact numerical solutions strongly support the results.
Two-level atoms interacting with a one-mode cavity field at zero temperature have order parameters which reflect the presence of a quantum phase transition at a critical value of the atom–cavity coupling strength. Two popular examples are the number of photons inside the cavity and the number of excited atoms. Coherent states provide a mean field description, which becomes exact in the thermodynamic limit. Employing symmetry-adapted (SA) SU (2) coherent states the quantum crossover, precursor of the critical behavior, can be described for a finite number of atoms. A variation after projection treatment, involving a numerical minimization of the SA energy surface, associates the quantum crossover with a discontinuity in the order parameters, which originates from competition between two local minima in the SA energy surface. Although this discontinuity is not present in finite systems, it provides a good description of 1/ N effects in the observables.
We study the numerical solutions of the Dicke Hamiltonian, which describes a system of many two level atoms interacting with a monochromatic radiation field into a cavity. The Dicke model is an example of a quantum collective behavior which shows superradiant quantum phase transitions in the thermodynamic limit. Results obtained employing two different bases are compared. Both of them use the pseudospin basis to describe the atomic states. For the photon states we use in one case Fock states, while in the other case we use a basis built over a particular coherent state, associated to each atomic state. It is shown that, when the number of atoms increases, the description of the ground state of the system in the superradiant phase requires an equivalent number of photons to be included. This imposes a strong limit to the states that can be calculated using Fock states, while the dimensionality needed to obtain convergent results in the other basis decreases when the atomic number increases, allowing calculations that are very difficult in the Fock basis. Naturally, it reduces also the computing time, economizing computing resources. We show results for the energy, the photon number and the number of excited atoms, for the ground and the first excited state.
We show that semiclassical states adapted to the symmetry of the Hamiltonian are an excellent approximation to the exact quantum solution of the ground and first excited states of the Dicke model. Their overlap with the exact quantum states is very close to 1 except in a close vicinity of the quantum phase transition. Furthermore, they have analytic forms in terms of the model parameters and allow us to calculate analytically the expectation values of field and matter observables. Some of these differ considerably from results obtained via the standard coherent states and by means of Holstein-Primakoff series expansion of the Dicke Hamiltonian. Comparison with exact solutions obtained numerically supports our results. In particular, it is shown that the expectation values of the number of photons and of the number of excited atoms have no singularities at the phase transition. We comment on why other authors have previously found otherwise.
The transition to the super-radiant regime in the Dicke model of two-level atoms interacting with a one-mode radiation field has been argued to be impossible for many years. Recently, however, experimental results show that this transition is possible in an open system [1, 2]. Here we exhibit the power of the use of coherent states with restored symmetry to describe the superradiant regime of the Dicke Hamiltonian. These symmetry-adapted states allow for an analytic description of both the ground and first excited states. From these, analytical expressions for all expectation values of interest are obtained, valid for any number of atoms. All these results are exact in the thermodynamic limit.
In view of recent proposals for the realization of anisotropic light-matter interaction in such platforms as (i) nonstationary or inductively and capacitively coupled superconducting qubits, (ii) atoms in crossed fields, and (iii) semiconductor heterostructures with spin-orbital interaction, the concept of a generalized Dicke model, where coupling strengths of rotating wave and counter-rotating wave terms are unequal, has attracted great interest. For this model we study photon fluctuations in the critical region of normal-to-superradiant phase transition when both the temperatures and numbers of two-level systems are finite. In this case, the superradiant quantum phase transition is changed to a fluctuational region in the phase diagram that reveals two types of critical behaviors. These are regimes of Dicke model (with discrete Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ symmetry), and that of anti-Tavis-Cummings and Tavis-Cummings U(1)U(1)U(1) models. We show that squeezing parameters of photon condensate in these regimes show distinct temperature scalings. Besides, relative fluctuations of a photon number take universal values. We also find a temperature scale below which one approaches a zero-temperature quantum phase transition where quantum fluctuations dominate. Our effective theory is provided by a non-Goldstone functional for condensate mode and by Majorana representation of Pauli operators. We also discuss the Bethe ansatz solution for integrable U(1)U(1)U(1) limits.