A reception with cake in the h-bar will be held after the talk. All JILAns are welcome and encouraged to attend the talk and the reception.
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Abstract:
The concept of (quantum) phase transitions is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of 20th-century physics. While thermal and quantum phase transitions both depend on some “thermodynamic limit” where the number of system degrees of freedom tends to infinity, in dissipative quantum systems the phase-transition phenomenology can appear in meso- or even microscopic systems. In this talk, after reviewing some pertinent aspects of light-matter interaction and quantum dissipation, I present some examples of dissipative phase transitions in cavity QED systems. I introduce the even more recent concept of first-order dissipative phase transitions, and discuss the photon-blockade breakdown phenomenon – realized on the circuit QED platform –, where a phase transition occurs in a coupled system of just a single qubit and a resonator mode.