Critical Behavior of a Driven Dissipative System : Universality Beyond the Markovian Regime

Critical Behavior of a Driven Dissipative System : Universality Beyond the Markovian Regime
Y. S. Patil, H. F. H. Cheung, T. Villazon, A. G. Date, A. Polkovnikov, A. Chandran, and M. Vengalattore

Abstract

Through steady state measurements of divergent susceptibilities and critical exponents, we experimentally establish a continuous phase transition in a paradigmatic two-mode driven-dissipative system of a pair of nondegenerate, parametrically coupled, optomechanical oscillators. We demonstrate that universality near the transition manifests in the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of slow ramps across the transition, and is captured qualitatively and quantitatively by Kibble-Zurek scaling laws with two scaling parameters. We further investigate the influence of the system-bath interactions on the critical behavior by engineering power-law non-Markovian system-bath interactions through an active feedback protocol. While this non-Markovian system-bath interactions changes critical exponents, both the Kibble-Zurek paradigm and universality of the dynamics remain valid. We thus show that non-equilibrium ramps can be used to extract universal exponents in driven dissipative systems, opening new avenues to study the theoretically challenging cases of system-bath interactions and their influence on critical phenomena.