Engineering indefinitely long-lived localization in cavity-QED arrays

Abstract: By exploiting the nonlinear nature of the Jaynes Cumming's interaction, one can get photon population trapping in cavity-QED arrays. However, the unavoidable dissipative effects in a realistic system would destroy the self-trapped state by continuous photon leakage. To circumvent this issue, we show that a careful engineering of drive, dissipation and Hamiltonian results in achieving indefinitely sustained self-trapping. We show that the intricate interplay between drive, dissipation, and light-matter interaction results in requiring an optimal window of drive strengths in order to achieve such non-trivial steady states. We treat the two-cavity and four-cavity cases using exact open quantum many-body calculations. Additionally, in the semiclassical limit we scale up the system to a long 1-D chain and demonstrate localization de-localization transition in a driven-dissipative system. Although, our analysis is performed keeping cavity-QED systems in mind, our work is applicable to other driven-dissipative systems where nonlinearity plays a defining role.