Unconventional criticality in the driven Jaynes-Cummings model

ORAL

Abstract

We study the single-atom Jaynes-Cummings model in the presence of cavity damping and coherent cavity drive. The undamped version of this model is known to exhibit an eigenstate transition, closely related to “spontaneous dressed-state polarization”, when the cavity driving strength exceeds the atom-cavity coupling. We investigate the consequence of this transition for the steady state at small cavity damping rates. Numerical and analytical evidence suggests the existence of a critical exponent (the so-called photon flux exponent) that is intermediate to the case of either a quantum or a thermal phase transition with respect to the underlying Hamiltonian. We contrast this finding to the well-studied (large-N) limit of many atoms, showing new evidence that the critical behavior for a single atom is of a fundamentally different nature.

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Authors

  • Jonathan Curtis

    • Joint Quantum Institute, Dept. of Physics, UMD and NIST, College Park, MD 20742, USA

  • Jeremy Young

    • Joint Quantum Institute, Dept. of Physics, UMD and NIST, College Park, MD 20742, USA

  • Howard Carmichael

    • Dept. of Physics, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand

  • Mohammad Maghrebi

    • Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA

  • Alexey Gorshkov

    • Joint Quantum Institute and Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, Dept. of Physics, UMD and NIST, College Park, MD 20742, USA

  • Michael Foss-Feig

    • United States Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, Maryland 20783, USA