Superradiant phase transition with cavity-assisted dynamical spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

The superradiant phase transition represents an important quantum phenomenon that shows collective excitations based on the coupling between atoms and cavity modes. Spin-orbit coupling is another quantum effect which is induced by the interaction of the atomic internal degrees of freedom and center-of-mass momentum. In this work we consider the cavity-assisted dynamical spin-orbit coupling which comes from the combination of these two effects. It can generate a series of interesting quantum phenomena such as the flat spectrum and the discontinuity of the excitation energy spectrum around the critical point of the quantum phase transition. We further discuss the influence of atom decay and nonlinear coupling on the phase diagram. The atom decay suppresses the discontinuity of the phase diagram and the nonlinear coupling can break the symmetric properties of the phase transition. Our work provides a theoretical method to research the rich quantum phenomena in this dynamic many-body system.