We consider the Dicke model in the ultra-strong coupling limit to investigate thermal phase transitions and their precursors at finite particle numbers $N$ for bosonic and fermionic systems. We derive partition functions with degeneracy factors that account for the number of configurations and derive explicit expressions for the Landau free energy. This allows us to discuss the difference between the original Dicke (fermionic) and the bosonic case. We find a crossover between these two cases that shows up, e.g., in the specific heat.
A finite array of $N$ globally coupled Stratonovich models exhibits a continuous nonequilibrium phase transition. In the limit of strong coupling there is a clear separation of time scales of center of mass and relative coordinates. The latter relax very fast to zero and the array behaves as a single entity described by the center of mass coordinate. We compute analytically the stationary probability and the moments of the center of mass coordinate. The scaling behaviour of the moments near the critical value of the control parameter $a_c(N)$ is determined. We identify a crossover from linear to square root scaling with increasing distance from $a_c$. The crossover point approaches $a_c$ in the limit $N to infty$ which reproduces previous results for infinite arrays. The results are obtained in both the Fokker-Planck and the Langevin approach and are corroborated by numerical simulations. For a general class of models we show that the transition manifold in the parameter space depends on $N$ and is determined by the scaling behaviour near a fixed point of the stochastic flow.
We explore the influence of contact interactions on a synthetically spin-orbit coupled system of two ultracold trapped atoms. Even though the system we consider is bosonic, we show that a regime exists in which the competition between the contact and spin-orbit interactions results in the emergence of a ground state that contains a significant contribution from the anti-symmetric spin state. This ground state is unique to few-particle systems and does not exist in the mean-field regime. The transition to this state is signalled by an inversion in the average momentum from being dominated by centre-of-mass momentum to relative momentum and also affects the global entanglement shared between the real- and pseudo-spin spaces. Indeed, competition between the interactions can also result in avoided crossings in the groundstate which further enhances these correlations. However, we find that correlations shared between the pseudo-spin states are strongly depressed due to the spin-orbit coupling and therefore the system does not contain spin-spin entanglement.
We investigate the dynamics of the rate function and of local observables after a quench in models which exhibit phase transitions between a superfluid and an insulator in their ground states. Zeros of the return probability, corresponding to singularities of the rate functions, have been suggested to indicate the emergence of dynamical criticality and we address the question of whether such zeros can be tied to the dynamics of physically relevant observables and hence order parameters in the systems. For this we first numerically analyze the dynamics of a hard-core boson gas in a one-dimensional waveguide when a quenched lattice potential is commensurate with the particle density. Such a system can undergo a pinning transition to an insulating state and we find non-analytic behavior in the evolution of the rate function which is indicative of dynamical phase transitions. In addition, we perform simulations of the time dependence of the momentum distribution and compare the periodicity of this collapse and revival cycle to that of the non-analyticities in the rate function: the two are found to be closely related only for deep quenches. We then confirm this observation by analytic calculations on a closely related discrete model of hard-core bosons in the presence of a staggered potential and find expressions for the rate function for the quenches. By extraction of the zeros of the Loschmidt amplitude we uncover a non-equilibrium timescale for the emergence of non-analyticities and discuss its relationship with the dynamics of the experimentally relevant parity operator.
We study cold atomic gases with a contact interaction and confined into one-dimension. Crossing the confinement induced resonance the correlation between the bosons increases, and introduces an effective range for the interaction potential. Using the mapping onto the sine-Gordon model and a Hubbard model in the strongly interacting regime allows us to derive the phase diagram in the presence of an optical lattice. We demonstrate the appearance of a phase transition from a Luttinger liquid with algebraic correlations into a crystalline phase with a particle on every second lattice site.
We study the many-body phases of bosonic atoms with $N$ internal states confined to a 1D optical lattice under the influence of a synthetic magnetic field and strong repulsive interactions. The $N$ internal states of the atoms are coupled via Raman transitions creating the synthetic magnetic field in the space of internal spin states corresponding to recent experimental realisations. We focus on the case of strong $mbox{SU}(N)$ invariant local density-density interactions in which each site of the 1D lattice is at most singly occupied, and strong Raman coupling, in distinction to previous work which has focused on the weak Raman coupling case. This allows us to keep only a single state per site and derive a low energy effective spin $1/2$ model. The effective model contains first-order nearest neighbour tunnelling terms, and second-order nearest neighbour interactions and correlated next-nearest neighbour tunnelling terms. By adjusting the flux $phi$ one can tune the relative importance of first-order and second-order terms in the effective Hamiltonian. In particular, first-order terms can be set to zero, realising a novel model with dominant second-order terms. We show that the resulting competition between density-dependent tunnelling and repulsive density-density interaction leads to an interesting phase diagram including a phase with long-ranged pair-superfluid correlations. The method can be straightforwardly extended to higher dimensions and lattices of arbitrary geometry including geometrically frustrated lattices where the interplay of frustration, interactions and kinetic terms is expected to lead to even richer physics.