Nonequilibrium phase diagram of a driven and dissipative many-body system

Tomadin, Andrea and Diehl, Sebastian and Zoller, Peter (2011) Nonequilibrium phase diagram of a driven and dissipative many-body system. Physical review a, 83 (1): 013611. ISSN 1050-2947

Abstract

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a many-body bosonic system on a lattice, subject to driving and dissipation. The time evolution is described by a master equation, which we treat within a generalized Gutzwiller mean field approximation for density matrices. The dissipative processes are engineered such that the system, in the absence of interaction between the bosons, is driven into a homogeneous steady state with off-diagonal long-range order. We investigate how the coherent interaction affects the properties of the steady state of the system qualitatively and derive a nonequilibrium phase diagram featuring a phase transition into a steady state without long-range order. The phase diagram also exhibits an extended domain where an instability of the homogeneous steady state gives rise to a persistent density pattern with spontaneously broken translational symmetry. In the limit of low particle density, we provide a precise analytical description of the time evolution during the instability. Moreover, we investigate the transient following a quantum quench of the dissipative processes and we elucidate the prominent role played by collective topological variables in this regime.