Crossover from the discontinuous to continuous phase transitions in dissipative spin system with collective decay

Abstract: We investigate the steady-state phase transitions in an all-to-all transverse-field Ising model subjected to an environment. The considered model is composed of two ingredient Hamiltonians. The orientation of the external field, which is perpendicular to the spin interaction, can be tuned to be along either $x$ direction or $z$ direction in each ingredient Hamiltonian while the dissipations always tend to flip the spins down to the $z$ direction. By means of mean-field approximation, we find that the quasi continuous steady-state phase transition is presented as a consequence of the merging of two branches of steady-state solutions. The emergence of bistability is confirmed by analyzing the steady-state behaviors of a set of finite-size systems which is also revealed by the Liouvillian spectrum.