Dicke time crystals in driven-dissipative quantum many-body systems

Understand

The Dicke model -- a paradigmatic example of superradiance in quantum optics -- describes an ensemble of atoms which are collectively coupled to a leaky cavity mode.

• As a result of the cooperative nature of these interactions, the system's dynamics are captured by the behavior of a single mean-field, collective spin.
• In this mean-field limit, it has recently been shown that the interplay between photon losses and periodic driving of light-matter coupling can lead to time-crystalline-like behavior of the collective spin.
• In this work, we investigate whether such a Dicke time crystal is stable to perturbations that explicitly break the mean-field solvability of the conventional Dicke model.