Dicke phase transition and collapse of superradiant phase in optomechanical cavity with arbitrary number of atoms

Abstract

We in this paper derive the analytical expressions of ground-state energy, average photon-number, and the atomic population by means of the spin-coherent-state variational method for arbitrary number of atoms in an optomechanical cavity. It is found that the existence of mechanical oscillator does not affect the phase boundary between the normal and superradiant phases. However, the superradiant phase collapses by the resonant damping of the oscillator when the atom–field coupling increases to a so-called turning point. As a consequence the system undergoes at this point an additional phase transition from the superradiant phase to a new normal phase of the atomic population-inversion state. The region of superradiant phase decreases with the increase of photon–phonon coupling. It shrinks to zero at a critical value of the coupling and a direct atomic population transfer appears between two atom-levels. Moreover we find an unstable nonzero-photon state, which is the counterpart of the superradiant state. In the absence of oscillator our result reduces exactly to that of Dicke model. Particularly the ground-state energy for N=1 (i.e. the Rabi model) is in perfect agreement with the numerical diagonalization in a wide region of coupling constant for both red and blue detuning. The Dicke phase transition remains for the Rabi model in agreement with the recent observation.