Emergence of a quasi-ergodic steady state in a dissipative Tavis-Cummings array

Abstract

In an atom-photon interacting system described by Tavis Cummings Hubbard (TCH) model, we demonstrate the emergence of a quasi-steady state in a dissipative environment that exhibits intriguing ergodic behavior. The TCH model undergoes a dissipative transition from normal to superradiant phase hosting a gapped Higgs and gapless Goldstone modes. However, in a large region of the phase diagram, the instability of the Goldstone mode leads to the disappearance of the stable superradiant phase. In this regime, the decorrelator dynamics reveals light cone spreading of the perturbations and positive Lyapunov exponent, indicating enhanced fluctuations. Remarkably, a quasi-steady state emerges under quench dynamics in this unstable regime; in this state, a class of collective quantities such as site averaged photon number and atomic excitations approach a steady value, in spite of large temporal fluctuations in corresponding microscopic variables. This quasi-steady state describes an incoherent fluid of photons with significant phase fluctuation. The phase space dynamics reveals a fascinating ergodic behavior in presence of dissipation, leading to the characterization of the dynamical variables into two distinct classes. The first class includes site-averaged photon numbers and atomic excitations; these exhibit a stationary distribution regardless of the initial condition indicating ergodic behavior. The second class of variables, particularly those related to phase in contrast, retain information about the initial conditions, resulting in a violation of ergodicity for finite size system. Additionally, the dynamical variables of the ergodic class exhibit fascinating collective scarring phenomenon as the peak of their distribution is attracted towards the unstable steady state, analogous to the single particle quantum scar. We discuss the relevance of our findings in the current experiments.