Signatures of the super fluid-insulator phase transition in laser driven dissipative nonlinear cavity arrays

Understand

We analyze the non-equilibrium dynamics of a gas of interacting photons in an array of coupled dissipative nonlinear cavities driven by a pulsed external coherent field.

• Using a mean-field approach, we show that the system exhibits a phase transition from a Mott-insulator-like to a superfluid regime.
• For a given single-photon nonlinearity, the critical value of the photon tunneling rate at which the phase transition occurs increases with the increasing photon loss rate.
• We checked the robustness of the transition by showing its insensitivity to the initial state prepared by the the pulsed excitation.