Quantum phase transition in a three-level atom-molecule system

Abstract

We adopt a three-level bosonic model to investigate the quantum phase transition in an ultracold atom-molecule conversion system which includes one atomic mode and two molecular modes. Through thoroughly exploring the properties of energy-level structure, fidelity, and adiabatic geometric phase, we confirm that the system exhibits a second-order phase transition from an atom-molecule mixture phase to a pure molecule phase. We give the explicit expression of the critical point and obtain two scaling laws to characterize this transition. In particular, we find that both the critical exponents and the behavior of the ground-state geometric phase have obviously changed in contrast to a similar two-level model. Our analytical calculations show that the ground-state geometric phase jumps from zero to $\ensuremath{\pi}/3$ at the critical point. This discontinuous behavior has been checked by numerical simulations and it can be used to identify the phase transition in the system.