Complex/Dynamical Systems Seminar - Juan Restrepo

Synchronization of interacting quantum dipoles

Arrays of synchronized oscillators are ubiquitous in biological, physical and engineering systems. Although there has been significant progress in the study of synchronization in classical systems, the understanding of the same phenomenon in the quantum realm remains limited. In this talk I will
discuss the emergence of synchronization in arrays of quantum radiating dipoles coupled only via the anisotropic and long-range dipolar interactions. We find that in the presence of an incoherent energy source, dipolar interactions can lead to a resilient synchronized steady-state. A classical mean-field description of the model results in equations similar to the classical Kuramoto model for synchronization of phase oscillators. Using the mean-field formulation for the all-to-all coupled case, we characterize
the synchronized state and find that it exists only for a finite range of the external energy source rates. We compare the results obtained from the mean-field model with numerical simulations of the quantum system and find that synchronization is robust to quantum fluctuations and spatially decaying coupling, while still having intrinsically quantum features.