Observation of the photon-blockade breakdown phase transition

Abstract

Non-equilibrium phase transitions exist in damped-driven open quantum systems, when the continuous tuning of an external parameter leads to a transition between two robust steady states. In second-order transitions this change is abrupt at a critical point, whereas in first-order transitions the two phases can co-exist in a critical hysteresis domain. Here we report the observation of a first-order dissipative quantum phase transition in a driven circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) system. It takes place when the photon blockade of the driven cavity-atom system is broken by increasing the drive power. The observed experimental signature is a bimodal phase space distribution with varying weights controlled by the drive strength. Our measurements show an improved stabilization of the classical attractors up to the milli-second range when the size of the quantum system is increased from one to three artificial atoms. The formation of such robust pointer states could be used for new quantum measurement schemes or to investigate multi-photon quantum many-body phases.

7 pages, 4 figures

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• Fully quantum scalable description of driven dissipative lattice models
• Photon blockade and the quantum-to-classical transition in the driven-dissipative Josephson pendulum coupled to a resonator
• Quantum features of entropy production in driven-dissipative transitions
• Probing a dissipative phase transition with a trapped ion through reservoir engineering
• Spatial correlations in driven-dissipative photonic lattices
• Multiphoton blockade and antibunching in an optical cavity coupled with dipole-dipole interacting $\Lambda$-type atoms
• Mapping repulsive to attractive interaction in driven-dissipative quantum systems
• Visualizing the breakdown of quantum multimodality in coherently driven light-matter interaction
• Time- and frequency-domain two-particle correlations of a driven dissipative Bose-Hubbard model
• Power-law growth of time and strength of squeezing near quantum critical point
• Monitoring the resonantly driven Jaynes-Cummings oscillator by an external two-level emitter: A cascaded open-systems approach
• The Heisenberg picture of photodetection
• Masked states of an atom coupled to a standing-wave cavity mode