Frustrated Superradiant Phase Transition

Abstract

Frustration occurs when a system cannot find a lowest-energy configuration due to conflicting constraints. We show that a frustrated superradiant phase transition occurs when the ground-state superradiance of cavity fields due to local light-matter interactions cannot simultaneously minimize the positive photon hopping energies. We solve the Dicke trimer model on a triangle motif with both negative and positive hopping energies and show that the latter results in a six-fold degenerate ground-state manifold in which the translational symmetry is spontaneously broken. In the frustrated superradiant phase, we find that two sets of diverging time and fluctuation scales coexist, one governed by the mean-field critical exponent and another by a novel critical exponent. The latter is associated with the fluctuation in the difference of local order parameters and gives rise to site-dependent photon number critical exponents, which may serve as an experimental probe for the frustrated superradiant phase. We provide a qualitative explanation for the emergence of unconventional critical scalings and demonstrate that they are generic properties of the frustrated superradiant phase at the hand of a one-dimensional Dicke lattice with an odd number of sites. The mechanism for the frustrated superradiant phase transition discovered here applies to any lattice geometries where the anti-ferromagnetic ordering of neighboring sites are incompatible and therefore our work paves the way towards the exploration of frustrated phases of coupled light and matter.

5+12 pages, 11 figures

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• Multicritical dissipative phase transitions in the anisotropic open quantum Rabi model
• Non-Gaussian superradiant transition via three-body ultrastrong coupling
• Anomalous criticality with bounded fluctuations and long-range frustration induced by broken time-reversal symmetry
• Quantum phase transitions in the triangular coupled-top model
• Chiral Quantum Phases and Tricriticality in a Dicke Triangle
• Quantum Phase Transitions in a Generalized Dicke Model
• Quantum phase transitions in a Dicke trimer with both photon and atom hoppings
• Frustrated Rydberg Atom Arrays Meet Cavity-QED: Emergence of the Superradiant Clock Phase
• Spontaneous superradiant photon current
• Meissner-Like Currents of Photons in Anomalous Superradiant Phases
• Observe novel tricritical phenomena in self-organized Fermi gas induced by higher order Fermi surface nesting
• Controlling Symmetries and Quantum Criticality in the Anisotropic Coupled-Top Model