Bistability Emerges From Fluctuations in Coupled Quantum Systems

Luisa Tolle of Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA, Grenoble INP, IRIG, Pheliqs, F-38000 Grenoble, France and Physikalisches Institut, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany, along with colleagues, have demonstrated that fluctuation-induced bistability is a consistently observable phenomenon in strongly interacting quantum systems with strong light-matter coupling. The researchers identified resonances between photonic transitions and many-body energy scales as a unifying microscopic mechanism behind this bistability, appearing across systems including interacting spins, fermions, and bosons. To investigate this, the team developed a “dressed-state rate equation approach,” revealing rich metastable dynamics and allowing study of how the phenomenon changes with system size. Their results, confirmed by tensor-network simulations of small systems and, and (f), establish fluctuation-induced bistability as a universal feature of these coupled quantum systems and…