Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the laser transition

In analogy with equilibrium phase transitions, we address the problem of the instability to symmetry-breaking perturbations of systems undergoing a laser transition. The symmetry in question is the U(1) invariance with respect to a phase factor, and the perturbation is a coherent field E, coupled to the exciton. At the rate-equation level we analyze first the case of a cavity containing a single, two-level emitter, and then a chain of such cavities interacting by photon-hopping processes. In both cases, spontaneous symmetry breaking takes place when the system is in the lasing phase. For the laser transition, the analog of the thermodynamic limit is the scaling limit of vanishing cavity loss and light-matter coupling, kappa -> 0, g -> 0, so that g(2)/kappa remains finite. We show that in the lasing regime, anomalous averages persist in the E -> 0 limit, provided that the scaling limit is performed first. Lasing diagnosis based on robust anomalous averages is compared numerically with the familiar coherence criterion g((2))(0) = 1, and the advantages of the former are discussed.