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arXiv:1107.3447 · Physical Review Letters

Absence of Vacuum Induced Berry Phases without the Rotating Wave Approximation in Cavity QED

Jonas Larson

Published Jan 18, 2012• 71 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We revisit earlier studies on Berry phases suggested to appear in certain cavity QED settings. It has been especially argued that a nontrivial geometric phase is achievable even in the situation of no cavity photons. We, however, show that such results hinge on imposing the rotating wave approximation (RWA), while without the RWA no Berry phases occur in these schemes. A geometrical interpretation of our results is obtained by introducing semiclassical energy surfaces which in a simple way brings out the phase-space dynamics. With the RWA, a conical intersection between the surfaces emerges and encircling it gives rise to the Berry phase. Without the RWA, the conical intersection is absent and therefore the Berry phase vanishes. It is believed that this is a first example showing how the application of the RWA in the Jaynes-Cummings model may lead to false conclusions, regardless of the mutual strengths between the system parameters.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.108.033601

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We revisit earlier studies on Berry phases suggested to appear in certain cavity QED settings. It has been especially argued that a nontrivial geometric phase is achievable even in the situation of no cavity photons. We, however, show that such results hinge on imposing the rotating wave approximation (RWA), while without the RWA no Berry phases occur in these schemes. A geometrical interpretation of our results is obtained by introducing semiclassical energy surfaces which in a simple way brings out the phase-space dynamics. With the RWA, a conical intersection between the surfaces emerges and encircling it gives rise to the Berry phase. Without the RWA, the conical intersection is absent and therefore the Berry phase vanishes. It is believed that this is a first example showing how the application of the RWA in the Jaynes-Cummings model may lead to false conclusions, regardless of the mutual strengths between the system parameters.
We address Berry phases that have been predicted to appear when a two-level system interacts with a quantized field, including the vacuum state. The issue became controversial after it was argued that the appearance of such Berry phases is an artifact of the rotating-wave approximation (RWA). As is widely believed, whenever the RWA applies, one may replace the Rabi model of a two-level system interacting with a quantized field by the analytically solvable Jaynes-Cummings model. Conflicting predictions of these two models under conditions that validate the RWA would signal a serious inconsistency of this approximation. We show that this is not the case and that claims to the contrary are inconsistent with analytical results concerning the Rabi model. We provide also numerical evidence supporting our analytical approach. Furthermore, we argue that the appearance of Berry phases in the addressed cases does not depend on adiabatic conditions nor on any particular Hamiltonian, but on the underlying vector space. Thus, the appropriate framework is given by the kinematic approach to geometric phases, which contains Berry's phase as a special case.
I revisit a longstanding question in quantum optics; when is the rotating wave approximation justified? In terms of the Jaynes–Cummings and Rabi models I demonstrate that the approximation in general breaks down in the adiabatic limit regardless of system parameters. This is explicitly shown by comparing Berry phases of the two models, where it is found that this geometrical phase is strictly zero in the Rabi model contrary to the non-trivial Berry phase of the Jaynes–Cummings model. The source of this surprising result is traced back to different topologies in the two models.
With reference to the vacuum-induced Berry phase (VIBP) obtained in the interaction of a spin-1/2 particle with quantized irradiation field under rotating-wave approximation (RWA), we present a completely different treatment for the VIBP by a fully quantum-mechanical treatment beyond the RWA, which gives different definition of the VIBP and indicates the validity of RWA to be relevant not only to the energy conservation and comparison of characteristic parameters, but also to more subtle physics, such as the geometric property of the state evolution. Our result is of conceptual importance and also of significant relevance to quantum-information processing.
The Berry phase [3] is traditionally understood as a geometric phase acquired during cyclic adiabatic evolution, often interpreted as the flux of an effective “magnetic field” through a solid angle in parameter space. In this thesis, we investigate situations in which a geometric phase arises even when no spatial solid angle is enclosed, revealing the limitations of the standard purely spatial interpretation. We first review the Berry phase for a spin-½ particle in a slowly varying magnetic field and analyze scenarios in which the system’s eigenstate is changed during the adiabatic evolution. We show that the resulting phase can be understood through a spacetime formulation analogous to the electrodynamic Aharonov–Bohm effect [1], where both “analogous magnetic” and “analogous electric” fields contribute through a spacetime surface integral. This framework clarifies how nonzero geometric phases can occur even when the projected spatial solid angle vanishes. We then extend this perspective to the Jahn–Teller 𝐸 ⊗ 𝑒 system. While a closed loop around the conical intersection yields the familiar π phase, we show that nontrivial geometric phases can also emerge in paths with zero net enclosed solid angle. Advisors: Herman Batelaan and Ilya Kravchenko
Jahn-Teller systems and the Jahn-Teller effect are discussed in terms of cavity QED models. By expressing the field modes in a quadrature representation, it is shown that certain setups of a two-level system interacting with a bimodal cavity are described by the Jahn-Teller $E\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\ensuremath{\epsilon}$ Hamiltonian. We identify the corresponding adiabatic potential surfaces and the conical intersection. The effects of a nonzero geometrical Berry phase, governed by encircling the conical intersection, are studied in detail both theoretically and numerically. The numerical analysis is carried out by applying a wave packet propagation method, more commonly used in molecular or chemical physics, and analytic expressions for the characteristic time scales are presented. It is found that the collapse-revival structure is greatly influenced by the geometrical phase and as a consequence, the field intensities contain direct information about this phase. We also mention the link between the Jahn-Teller effect and the Dicke phase transition in cavity QED.
Since a pioneer work on vacuum-induced Berry phase (VIBP) was done by Fuentes-Guridi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 (2002) 220404], much attention has been paid to the geometric phase effects of vacuum field. However, all the so-called VIBPs investigated previously are not purely vacuum-induced (i.e. the nonvacuum components of the field are also involved). In this paper, we discuss how to deliver geometric phases from the evolution of a genuine vacuum field in a standard cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) system. First, we design a cyclic evolution of an atom–field system with the atom being initially prepared at the excited state and the field at the genuine vacuum. Then, we calculate the geometric phases acquired during such a cyclic evolution. It is found that such geometric phases are really induced by an evolution of the genuine vacuum field. Specifically, our generic proposal is demonstrated with both the one- and two-mode Jaynes–Cummings model interactions (JCM).