Emergent macroscopic bistability induced by a single superconducting qubit

  1. R. Sett,
  2. F. Hassani,
  3. D. Phan,
  4. S. Barzanjeh,
  5. A. Vukics,
  6. and J. M. Fink
The photon blockade breakdown in a continuously driven cavity QED system has been proposed as a prime example for a first-order driven-dissipative quantum phase transition. But the
predicted scaling from a microscopic system – dominated by quantum fluctuations – to a macroscopic one – characterized by stable phases – and the associated exponents and phase diagram have not been observed so far. In this work we couple a single transmon qubit with a fixed coupling strength g to an in-situ bandwidth κ tuneable superconducting cavity to controllably approach this thermodynamic limit. Even though the system remains microscopic, we observe its behavior to become more and more macroscopic as a function of g/κ. For the highest realized g/κ≈287 the system switches with a characteristic dwell time as high as 6 seconds between a bright coherent state with ≈8×103 intra-cavity photons and the vacuum state with equal probability. This exceeds the microscopic time scales by six orders of magnitude and approaches the near perfect hysteresis expected between two macroscopic attractors in the thermodynamic limit. These findings and interpretation are qualitatively supported by semi-classical theory and large-scale Quantum-Jump Monte Carlo simulations. Besides shedding more light on driven-dissipative physics in the limit of strong light-matter coupling, this system might also find applications in quantum sensing and metrology.

Observation of the photon-blockade breakdown phase transition

  1. J. M. Fink,
  2. A. Dombi,
  3. A. Vukics,
  4. A. Wallraff,
  5. and P. Domokos
Non-equilibrium phase transitions exist in damped-driven open quantum systems, when the continuous tuning of an external parameter leads to a transition between two robust steady states.
In second-order transitions this change is abrupt at a critical point, whereas in first-order transitions the two phases can co-exist in a critical hysteresis domain. Here we report the observation of a first-order dissipative quantum phase transition in a driven circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) system. It takes place when the photon blockade of the driven cavity-atom system is broken by increasing the drive power. The observed experimental signature is a bimodal phase space distribution with varying weights controlled by the drive strength. Our measurements show an improved stabilization of the classical attractors up to the milli-second range when the size of the quantum system is increased from one to three artificial atoms. The formation of such robust pointer states could be used for new quantum measurement schemes or to investigate multi-photon quantum many-body phases.