Emergent light crystal from frustration and pump engineering

Abstract: We demonstrate how pump engineering drives the emergence of frustration-induced quasi-long-range order in a low-dimensional photonic cavity array. We consider a Lieb chain of nonlinear cavities as described by the Bose-Hubbard model and featuring a photonic flat band in the single-particle spectrum. Incoherent pumping of the Lieb lattice leads to a photonic density-wave which manifests an algebraic decay of correlations with twice the period of the lattice unit cell. This work opens up new directions for the emergence of strongly-correlated phases in quantum optical frustrated systems through pump design.