Dicke Transition in Open Many-Body Systems Determined by Fluctuation Effects

We develop an approach to describe the Dicke transition of interacting many-particle systems strongly coupled to the light of a lossy cavity. A mean-field approach is combined with a perturbative treatment of fluctuations beyond mean field, which becomes exact in the thermodynamic limit. These fluctuations completely change the nature of the steady state, determine the thermal character of the transition, and lead to universal properties of the emerging self-organized states. We validate our results by comparing them with time-dependent matrix-product-state calculations.