Pattern formation and exotic order in driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard systems

Abstract: Modern experimental platforms such as supercoducting-circuit arrays call for the exploration of bosonic tight-binding models in unconventional situations with no counterpart in real materials. Here we investigate one of such situations, in which excitations are driven and damped by pairs, leading to pattern formation and exotic bosonic states emerged from a non-equilibrium quantum many-body system. Focusing on a two-dimensional driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard model, we find that its steady states are characterized by the condensation of bosons around momenta lying on a "Bose surface", a bosonic analogue of the Fermi surface in solid-state systems. The interplay between instabilities generated by the driving, the nonlinear dissipative mode-coupling, and the underlaying lattice effect, allows the system to equilibrate into an exotic superfluid state of bosons condensed on a closed ring in momentum space instead of discrete points. Such an unconventional state with a spatially uniform density distribution goes beyond the traditional scope of pattern formation, and thus has no counterpart in the classical literature. In addition, it is a state connected to several open problems in modern condensed-matter physics, and here we provide the means to stabilize it, opening the way to its experimental study. Moreover, we also provide a concrete experimental implementation of our model in currently-available superconducting-circuit arrays. We also investigate the relaxation spectrum around the condensate, which shows a characteristic purely diffusive behavior.