Quantum Criticality from Spectral Collapse in the Two-Photon Rabi Model.

Authors

Jiong Li, Jun-Ling Wang, Qing-Hu Chen, Hai-Qing Lin

Published in

Physical review letters. Volume 137. Issue 12. Pages 123602. Sep 18, 2026.

Abstract

Spectral collapse in the two-photon quantum Rabi model (tpQRM) has long been regarded as insufficient to establish quantum criticality because, under generic conditions, the lowest excitation gap remains finite. We show that, at a special qubit frequency, spectral collapse in the anisotropic tpQRM constitutes a continuous quantum phase transition governed by a single soft mode. The same-parity gap, set by the vanishing effective oscillator frequency, closes with exponent zν=1/2, whereas the lower different-parity gap arises from symmetry-induced splitting. Parity symmetry excludes the different-parity excitation from the quantum Fisher information response and restricts Kibble-Zurek dynamics to excitations within the ground-state parity sector. Together, these results identify the same-parity excitation as the soft mode and its gap as the characteristic energy scale. The corresponding critical exponents, ν=1/4 and z=2, place the anisotropic tpQRM in the same universality class as the standard quantum Rabi model. Our results establish spectral collapse as a potential route to experimentally accessible quantum criticality in a few-body system and show that universality is determined by the soft-mode structure rather than by the closing of the lowest excitation gap.

PMID:
42826974
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 03 Oct 2026.

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