Boundary-induced Phases in the Dissipative Dicke Lattice Model

The superradiant phase transition in the dissipative Dicke lattice model, driven by on-site collective atom-photon interactions and inter-site photon hopping, is a cornerstone of nonequilibrium quantum many-body physics. However, little is still known about the influence of boundaries in experimental achievable systems of finite size. Here we investigate the dissipative superradiant phase transition in the Dicke lattice model with a small number of sites and reveal a striking sensitivity of this model to the nature of the boundary conditions. Specifically, we find that under open boundary conditions a whole zoo of superradiant phases with broken translational symmetry appears, which is not observed in the corresponding infinite lattice system. Our results demonstrate the crucial influence of boundary effects on the stationary phases of dissipative lattice models, which offers intriguing new opportunities for studying these phenomena in near term experimental realizations of such models in quantum optics and circuit QED.