Analytical phase boundary of a quantum driven-dissipative Kerr oscillator from classical stochastic instantons

Journal article, 2026

The framework of Keldysh path integral concisely describes quantum systems driven away from thermal equilibrium, such as the two-photon driven Kerr oscillator. Within the thermodynamic limit of diverging photon number, we map it to a Martin-Siggia-Rose-Janssen-de Dominicis path integral and obtain a purely classical, stochastic equivalent where photon self-interaction plays the role of temperature. This perspective sheds light on the difficulties encountered in the search for an effective thermodynamic potential to describe the bistability of the model. It allows us to estimate the bistable tunneling rates using a real-time instanton technique leading to an analytical expression of the phase boundary, the first to our knowledge. It opens the way to powerful semianalytical techniques to be applied to various quantum optics models displaying bistability.