2008/06/05 by Davide Rossini, Rosario Fazio, Giuseppe E. Santoro +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #cond-mat.other #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/83/47011
published as Europhys. Lett. 83, 47011 (2008) · 6 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2008/06/05 · openalex publication_date 2008/08/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We propose to detect the Mott insulator-superfluid quantum phase transition in an array of coupled cavities by studying the polariton and photon fluctuations in a block of linear dimension M (in units of the lattice constant of the array). We explicitly show this for a one-dimensional array; the analysis can be however extended to higher dimensions. In the Mott phase polariton fluctuations are independent of the block size. In the superfluid phase they grow logarithmically with M , the prefactor being related to the compressibility of the system. In the case of photon fluctuations, the critical behaviour is encoded in the subleading scaling with the block dimension, while the leading behaviour is linear in M and non-critical. Our results have been obtained by means of the density matrix renormalization group numerical algorithm.