• Corpus ID: 252544955

Many-body superradiance and dynamical symmetry breaking in waveguide QED

@inproceedings{CardenasLopez2022ManybodySA,
  title={Many-body superradiance and dynamical symmetry breaking in waveguide QED},
  author={Silvia Cardenas-Lopez and Stuart J Masson and Zoe Zager and Ana Asenjo-Garcia},
  year={2022}
}

• Silvia Cardenas-Lopez, Stuart J Masson, +1 author A. Asenjo-Garcia
• Published 26 September 2022
• Physics

The many-body decay of extended collections of two-level systems remains an open problem. Here, we investigate whether an array of qubits coupled to a one-dimensional bath undergoes Dicke superradiance, a process whereby a completely inverted system synchronizes as it decays, generating correlations between qubits via dissipation. This leads to the release of all the energy in the form of a rapid photon burst. We derive the minimal conditions for the burst to happen as a function of the number of qubits, the chirality of the waveguide, and the single-qubit optical depth, both for ordered and disordered ensembles. Many-body superradiance occurs because the initial fluctuation that triggers the emission is amplified through the decay process. We show that this avalanche-like behavior leads to a dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking, where most photons are emitted into either the left- or the right-propagating optical modes, giving rise to an emergent chirality. Superradiant bursts may be a smoking gun for the generation of correlated photon states of exotic quantum statistics. This physics can be explored in diverse setups, ranging from atoms close to nanofibers to superconducting qubits coupled to transmission lines.