Abstract
We study the driven-dissipative dynamics of photons interacting with an array of micromechanical membranes in an optical cavity. Periodic membrane driving and phonon creation result in an effective photon-number conserving non-unitary dynamics, which features a steady state with long-range photonic coherence. If the leakage of photons out of the cavity is counteracted by incoherent driving of the photonic modes, we show that the system undergoes a dynamical phase transition to the state with long-range coherence. A minimal system, composed of two micromechanical membranes in a cavity, is studied in detail, and it is shown to be a realistic setup where the key processes of the driven-dissipative dynamics can be seen.
Highlights
While quantum computing and quantum simulation are traditionally discussed as dynamics of isolated many-body systems governed by a unitary time evolution [1,2,3,4], recent interest has turned to engineering and controlling the time evolution of open quantum systems
In light of the recent discussion of cavity arrays and photonic quantum simulation [12,13], it seems natural to ask to what extent the concepts of quantum reservoir engineering and associated nonequilibrium phenomena can be realized with coupled photonic systems
We have devised a scheme to implement a driven-dissipative dynamics for photons in an OM setup
Summary
While quantum computing and quantum simulation are traditionally discussed as dynamics of isolated many-body systems governed by a unitary time evolution [1,2,3,4], recent interest has turned to engineering and controlling the time evolution of open quantum systems. [6], a scenario of open system dynamics was discussed, where driven-dissipative dynamics drives the system of interest into a (desired) entangled steady state, and where competition between the coherent Hamiltonian and the dissipative Liouvillian terms in the ME gives rise to a rich nonequilibrium phase diagram and dynamical phase transitions [7,8], which do not have immediate condensed matter counterparts Such far-from-equilibrium systems may open up new perspectives for many-body physics, challenging both theory and experiment. We describe the appearance of dissipation processes in extended OM arrays, where in contrast to OM laser cooling, the mechanical systems provide a decoherence channel for light This mechanism already provides a basic building block for reservoir engineering for light, and we discuss how this can be used to study the dissipation-induced preparation of photonic states with long-range coherence [36].
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