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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 69: Collective Effects and Disordered Systems
Q 69.1: Talk
Friday, March 6, 2026, 11:00–11:15, P 2
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in nonlinear superradiance — •Nikolai Klimkin1 and Mikhail Ivanov1,2,3 — 1Max Born Institute, Max-Born Straße 2A, 12489 Berlin, Germany — 2Institute of Physics, Humboldt University Berlin, 12489 Berlin, Germany — 3Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, 3200003 Haifa, Israel
Creation and manipulation of non-classical states of light is rapidly becoming the focus of modern attosecond science. Here, we demonstrate numerically how such states can arise by considering a modification of the well-known problem of superradiance encountered already by Dicke. Similarly to him, we investigate photon emission by ensembles of indistinguishable atoms. In contrast to him, however, we leverage symmetry-based selection rules to suppress emission of single photons by single atoms. A steady state is therefore only reached following a spontaneous transition into a collective symmetry-broken state of atoms and photonic modes. The novel non-Markovian, non-perturbative method applied allows us to observe a large quantum state of light form and exhibit drastically non-classical statistics once the system undergoes a symmetry-breaking transition.
Keywords: superradiance; Fock states; cavity QED; spin-boson model; spontaneous symmetry breaking