No Arabic abstract
Various quantum phase transitions in the anisotropic Rabi-Stark model with both the nonlinear Stark coupling and the linear dipole coupling between a two-level system and a single-mode cavity are studied in this work. The first-order quantum phase transitions are detected by the level crossing of the ground-state and the first-excited state with the help of the pole structure of the transcendental functions derived by the Bogoliubov operators approach. As the nonlinear Stark coupling is the same as the cavity frequency, this model can be solved by mapping to an effective quantum oscillator. All energy levels close at the critical coupling in this case, indicating continuous quantum phase transitions. The critical gap exponent is independent of the anisotropy as long as the counter-rotating wave coupling is present, but essentially changed if the counter-rotating wave coupling disappears completely. It is suggested that the gapless Goldstone mode excitations could appear above a critical coupling in the present model in the rotating-wave approximation.
The out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) is used to study the quantum phase transitions (QPTs) between the normal phase and the superradiant phase in the Rabi and few-body Dicke models with large frequency ratio of theatomic level splitting to the single-mode electromagnetic radiation field frequency. The focus is on the OTOC thermally averaged with infinite temperature, which is an experimentally feasible quantity. It is shown that thecritical points can be identified by long-time averaging of the OTOC via observing its local minimum behavior. More importantly, the scaling laws of the OTOC for QPTs are revealed by studying the experimentally accessible conditions with finite frequency ratio and finite number of atoms in the studied models. The critical exponents extracted from the scaling laws of OTOC indicate that the QPTs in the Rabi and Dicke models belong to the same universality class.
We explore an extended quantum Rabi model describing the interaction between a two-mode bosonic field and a three-level atom. Quantum phase transitions of this few degree of freedom model is found when the ratio $eta$ of the atom energy scale to the bosonic field frequency approaches infinity. An analytical solution is provided when the two lowest-energy levels are degenerate. According to it, we recognize that the phase diagram of the model consists of three regions: one normal phase and two superradiant phases. The quantum phase transitions between the normal phase and the two superradiant phases are of second order relating to the spontaneous breaking of the discrete $Z_{2}$ symmetry. On the other hand, the quantum phase transition between the two different superradiant phases is discontinuous with a phase boundary line relating to the continuous $U(1)$ symmetry. For a large enough but finite $eta$, the scaling function and critical exponents are derived analytically and verified numerically, from which the universality class of the model is identified.
Promising applications of the anisotropic quantum Rabi model (AQRM) in broad parameter ranges are explored, which is realized with superconducting flux qubits simultaneously driven by two-tone time-dependent magnetic fields. Regarding the quantum phase transitions (QPTs), with assistant of fidelity susceptibility, we extract the scaling functions and the critical exponents, with which the universal scaling of the cumulant ratio is captured with rescaling of the parameters due to the anisotropy. Moreover, a fixed point of the cumulant ratio is predicted at the critical point of the AQRM. In respect to quantum information tasks, the generation of the macroscopic Schr{o}dinger cat states and quantum controlled phase gates are investigated in the degenerate case of the AQRM, whose performance is also investigated by numerical calculation with practical parameters. Therefore, our results pave a way to explore distinct features of the AQRM in circuit QED systems for QPTs, quantum simulations and quantum information processings.
In this paper, we analyze the quantum criticality of the Rabi-Stark model at finite ratios of the qubit and cavity frequencies in terms of the energy gap, the order parameter, as well as the fidelity, if the Stark coupling strength is the same as the cavity frequency. The critical exponents are derived analytically. The energy gap and the length critical exponents are different from those in the quantum Rabi model and the Dicke model. The finite size scaling analysis for the order parameter and the fidelity susceptibility is also performed. The universal scaling behaviors are demonstrated and several finite size exponents can be then extracted. Furthermore, universal critical behavior can be also established in terms of the bosonic Hilbert space truncation number, and the corresponding critical scaling exponents are found. Interestingly, the critical correlation length exponents in terms of the photonic truncation number as well as the equivalently effective length scales are different in the Rabi-Stark model and the quantum Rabi model, suggesting they belong to different universality classes. The second-order quantum phase transition is convincingly corroborated in the Rabi-Stark model at finite frequency ratios, by contrast, it only emerges at the infinite frequency ratio in the original quantum Rabi model without the Stark coupling.
Motivated by the quantum adiabatic algorithm (QAA), we consider the scaling of the Hamiltonian gap at quantum first order transitions, generally expected to be exponentially small in the size of the system. However, we show that a quantum antiferromagnetic Ising chain in a staggered field can exhibit a first order transition with only an algebraically small gap. In addition, we construct a simple classical translationally invariant one-dimensional Hamiltonian containing nearest-neighbour interactions only, which exhibits an exponential gap at a thermodynamic quantum first-order transition of essentially topological origin. This establishes that (i) the QAA can be successful even across first order transitions but also that (ii) it can fail on exceedingly simple problems readily solved by inspection, or by classical annealing.