Superfluid-Mott Insulator Transition of Light in the Jaynes-Cummings Lattice

Abstract

Regular arrays of electromagnetic resonators, in turn coupled coherently to individual quantum two-level systems, exhibit a quantum phase transition of polaritons from a superfluid phase to a Mott-insulating phase. The critical behavior of such a Jaynes-Cummings lattice thus resembles the physics of the Bose-Hubbard model. We explore this analogy by elaborating on the mean-field theory of the phase transition, and by presenting several useful mappings which pinpoint both similarities and differences of the two models. We show that a field-theory approach can be applied to prove the existence of multicritical curves analogous to the multicritical points of the Bose-Hubbard model, and we provide analytical expressions for the position of these curves.