No Arabic abstract
Photon antibunching in the light scattered by single quantum emitters is one of the hallmarks of quantum optics, providing an unequivocal demonstration of the quantized nature of the electromagnetic field. Antibunching can be intuitively understood by the need for a two-level system lying in its lower state after emitting a photon to be re-excited into the upper one before a second emission can take place. Here we show that such a picture breaks down in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime, when the coupling strength becomes comparable to the bare emitter frequency. Specialising to the cases of both a natural and a superconducting artificial atom, we thus show that a single emitter coupled to a photonic resonator can emit bunched light. The result presented herein is a clear evidence of how the ultrastrong coupling regime is able to change the nature of individual atoms.
The Tavis-Cummings model for more than one qubit interacting with a common oscillator mode is extended beyond the rotating wave approximation (RWA). We explore the parameter regime in which the frequencies of the qubits are much smaller than the oscillator frequency and the coupling strength is allowed to be ultra-strong. The application of the adiabatic approximation, introduced by Irish, et al. (Phys. Rev. B textbf{72}, 195410 (2005)), for a single qubit system is extended to the multi-qubit case. For a two-qubit system, we identify three-state manifolds of close-lying dressed energy levels and obtain results for the dynamics of intra-manifold transitions that are incompatible with results from the familiar regime of the RWA. We exhibit features of two-qubit dynamics that are different from the single qubit case, including calculations of qubit-qubit entanglement. Both number state and coherent state preparations are considered, and we derive analytical formulas that simplify the interpretation of numerical calculations. Expressions for individual collapse and revival signals of both population and entanglement are derived.
We study the dynamics of two qubits interacting with a single mode of a harmonic oscillator beyond the rotating wave approximation in the ideally degenerate regime. Exact analytic expressions are obtained for state properties of interest, including qubit entanglement for a certain class of initial states of the oscillator and the qubits. Qualitative differences and similarities in the evolution of the qubits in the degenerate regime when the oscillator is treated quantum mechanically and classically are discussed.
A microscopic derivation of the master equation for the Jaynes-Cummings model with cavity losses is given, taking into account the terms in the dissipator which vary with frequencies of the order of the vacuum Rabi frequency. Our approach allows to single out physical contexts wherein the usual phenomenological dissipator turns out to be fully justified and constitutes an extension of our previous analysis [Scala M. {em et al.} 2007 Phys. Rev. A {bf 75}, 013811], where a microscopic derivation was given in the framework of the Rotating Wave Approximation.
The entanglement dynamics of two remote qubits is examined analytically. The qubits interact arbitrarily strongly with separate harmonic oscillators in the idealized degenerate limit of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. In contrast to well known non-degenerate RWA results, it is shown that ideally degenerate qubits cannot induce bipartite entanglement between their partner oscillators.
Although quantum physics is well understood in inertial reference frames (flat spacetime), a current challenge is the search for experimental evidence of non-trivial or unexpected behaviour of quantum systems in non-inertial frames. Here, we present a novel test of quantum mechanics in a non-inertial reference frame: we consider Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference on a rotating platform and study the effect of uniform rotation on the distinguishability of the photons. Both theory and experiments show that the rotational motion induces a relative delay in the photon arrival times at the exit beamsplitter and that this delay is observed as a shift in the position of the HOM dip. This experiment can be extended to a full general relativistic test of quantum physics using satellites in Earth orbit and indicates a new route towards the use of photonic technologies for investigating quantum mechanics at the interface with relativity.