Quantum chaos and thermalization in the two-mode Dicke model

Abstract

We discuss the onset of quantum chaos and thermalization in the two-mode Dicke model, which describes the dipolar interaction between an ensemble of spins and two bosonic modes. The two-mode Dicke model exhibits normal to superradiant quantum phase transition with spontaneous breaking either of a discrete or continuous symmetry. We study the behaviour of the fidelity out-of-time-order correlator (FOTOC) derived from the Loschmidt echo signal in the quantum phases of the model. We show that the exponential growth of the FOTOC in the beginning of the time evolution cannot be related to a classical unstable point in the general case. Furthermore, we find that the collective spin observable in the two-mode Dicke model quickly saturates to its long-time average value, and shows very good agreement between its diagonal ensemble average and microcanonical average even for a small number of spins. We show that the temporal fluctuations of the expectation value of the collective spin observable around its average are small and decrease with the effective system size, which leads to thermalization of the spin system.