Stabilizing arrays of photonic cat states via spontaneous symmetry breaking

The controlled generation and the protection of entanglement is key to quantum simulation and quantum computation. At the single-mode level, protocols based on photonic cat states hold strong promise as they present unprecedentedly long-lived coherence and may be combined with powerful error correction schemes. Here, we demonstrate that robust ensembles of "many-body photonic cat states" can be generated in a Bose-Hubbard model with pair hopping via a spontaneous U(1) symmetry breaking mechanism. We identify a parameter region where the ground state is a massively degenerate manifold consisting of local cat states which are factorized throughout the lattice and whose conserved individual parities can be used to make a register of qubits. This phenomenology occurs for arbitrary system sizes or geometries, as soon as long-range order is established, and it extends to driven-dissipative conditions. In the thermodynamic limit, it is related to a Mott insulator to pair-superfluid phase transition.