Excitations of a strongly-correlated photon fluid stabilized via incoherent drive and dissipation

We explore theoretically the spectral properties of the non-equilibrium photonic phases hosted by a lattice of coupled cavities in presence of non-Markovian driving and dissipation, as well as strong photon interactions [1, 2]. In particular, we analyse how the low-energy spectrum of the stationary state evolves across the Mott/superfluid-like transition exhibited by the model and analyse the non-trivial interplay between the diffusive Goldstone mode emerging in the symmetry-broken phase and the physical role of the remaining dissipative modes. Our study goes in the direction of investigating the potential of driven-dissipative photonic fluids to quantum simulate a wide range of many-body problems.

[1] A. Biella, F. Storme, J. Lebreuilly, D. Rossini, R. Fazio, I. Carusotto and C. Ciuti - Phys. Rev. A 96 023839 (2017)

[2] R. Ma, B. Saxberg, C. Owens, N. Leung, Y. Lu, J. Simon, D. I. Schuster - Nature 566, 51-57 (2019)