Vacuum-induced symmetry breaking in a superconducting quantum circuit

The ultrastrong-coupling regime, where the atom-cavity coupling rate reaches a considerable fraction of the cavity or atom transition frequencies, has been reported in a flux qubit superconducting quantum circuit coupled to an on-chip coplanar resonator. In this regime situations may arise where the resonator field ˆX = ˆa + ˆa † acquires a nonzero expectation value in the system ground state. We demonstrate that, in this case, the parity symmetry of an additional artificial atom with an even potential is broken by the interaction with the resonator. Such a mechanism is analogous to the Higgs mechanism where the gauge symmetry of the weak force’s gauge bosons is broken by the nonzero vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field. The results presented here open the way to controllable experiments on symmetry-breaking mechanisms induced by nonzero vacuum expectation values. Moreover, the mechanism proposed here can be used as a probe of the ground-state macroscopic coherence emerging from quantum phase transitions with vacuum degeneracy.