We have investigated theoretically a dissipative polariton system in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime without using the rotating-wave approximation on system-reservoir coupling. Photons in a cavity and excitations in matter respectively couple two large ensembles of harmonic oscillators (photonic and excitonic reservoirs). Inheriting the quantum statistics of polaritons in the ultrastrong coupling regime, in the ground state of the whole system, the two reservoirs are not in the vacuum states but they are squeezed and correlated. We presume the reservoirs to be in this nonvacuum state in the master equation and in the input-output formalism with Langevin equations. Both approaches consistently guarantee the decay of the polariton system to its ground state; no photon detection is also obtained when the polariton system is in the ground state.
We have investigated theoretically a dissipative polariton system in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime without using the rotating-wave approximation on system-reservoir coupling. Photons in a cavity and excitations in matter respectively couple two large ensembles of harmonic oscillators (photonic and excitonic reservoirs). Inheriting the quantum statistics of polaritons in the ultrastrong coupling regime, in the ground state of the whole system, the two reservoirs are not in the vacuum states but they are squeezed and correlated. We presume the reservoirs to be in this nonvacuum state in the master equation and in the input-output formalism with Langevin equations. Both approaches consistently guarantee the decay of the polariton system to its ground state; no photon detection is also obtained when the polariton system is in the ground state.
We present a full quantum theory for the dissipative dynamics of an optical cavity in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime, in which the vacuum Rabi frequency is a significant fraction of the active electronic transition frequency and the antiresonant terms of the light-matter coupling play an important role. In particular, our model can be applied to the case of intersubband transitions in doped semiconductor quantum wells embedded in a microcavity. The coupling of the intracavity photonic mode and of the electronic polarization to the external, frequency-dependent, dissipation baths is taken into account by means of quantum Langevin equations in the input-output formalism. In the case of a time-independent vacuum Rabi frequency, exact analytical expressions for the operators are obtained, which allows us to characterize the quantum dissipative response of the cavity to an arbitrary initial condition (vacuum, coherent field, thermal excitation). For a vacuum input in both the photonic and electronic polarization modes, the ground state of the cavity system is a two-mode squeezed vacuum state with a finite population in both photonic and electronic modes. These excitations are, however, virtual and cannot escape from the cavity: for a vacuum input, a vacuum output is found, without any trace of the intracavity squeezing. For a coherent photonic input the linear optical response spectra (reflectivity, absorption, transmission) have been studied, and signatures of the ultrastrong coupling have been identified in the asymmetric and peculiar anticrossing of the polaritonic eigenmodes. Finally, we have calculated the electroluminescence spectra in the case of an incoherent electronic input: the emission intensity in the ultrastrong coupling regime results in being significantly enhanced as compared to the case of an isolated quantum well without a surrounding cavity.
In the standard theory of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED), coupling between photons inside and outside a cavity (cavity system and environment) is given conserving the total number of photons. However, when the cavity photons (ultrastrongly) interact with atoms or excitations in matters, the system-environment coupling must be determined from a more fundamental viewpoint. Based on the Maxwell's boundary conditions in the QED theory for dielectric media, we derive the quantum Langevin equation and input-output relation, in which the total number of polaritons (not photons) inside the cavity and photons outside is conserved.
The ultrastrong coupling between the elementary excitations of matter and microcavity modes is studied in a fully analytical quantum-mechanical theoretical framework. The elementary excitation could be phonons, excitons, plasmons, etc. From the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian, we obtain the ground state of the polariton Hamiltonian. The ground state belongs to the Gaussian class. Using the Gaussian property, we calculate the quantum entanglement in the ground state. We use two different measures for quantum entanglement---entanglement entropy and the logarithmic negativity parameter---and obtain rather simple analytical expressions for the entanglement measures. Our findings show that the amount of quantum entanglement in the ground state is quite significant in the ultrastrong-coupling regime. It can be obtained from the measurement of the polariton frequencies.
The ultrastrong coupling regime of cavity photons and quantum materials has emerged as a pathway to modify materials properties, however definitive signatures of ultrastrong coupling remain elusive. Focusing on the quantum photon statistics of light transmitted through a cavity-embedded superconductor, we show that a two-photon Higgs polariton at strong coupling realizes a photonic nonlinearity at the single terahertz photon level. We find that as light-matter coupling increases, the photon statistics show pronounced changes due to the formation of a hybrid photon-matter dark-cavity state with finite photon occupancy, producing testable signatures of ultrastrong coupling. We derive a non-Markovian input output relation and study the cavity-embedded superconductor 2H-NbSe2 as it approaches ultrastrong light-matter coupling. Our results reveal a diagnostic for ultrastrong coupling in the two-photon coincidence statistics that is absent in total counts.
We study the collective dissipative dynamics of dipoles modeled as harmonic oscillators coupled to 1-D electromagnetic reservoirs. The bosonic nature of the dipole oscillators as well as the reservoir modes allows an exact numerical simulation of the dynamics for arbitrary coupling strengths. At weak coupling, apart from essentially recovering the dynamics expected from a Markovian Lindblad master equation, we also obtain non-Markovian effects for spatially separated two-level emitters. In the so called ultrastrong coupling regime, we find the dynamics and steady state depends on the choice of the reservoir which is chosen as either an ideal cavity with equispaced, unbounded dispersion or a cavity array with a bounded dispersion. Moreover, at even higher coupling strengths, we find a decoupling between the light and matter degrees of freedom attributable to the increased importance of the diamagnetic term in the Hamiltonian. In this regime, we find that the dependence of the dynamics on the separation between the dipoles is not important and the dynamics is dominated by the occupation of the polariton mode of lowest energy.
We investigate a coherently driven exciton--photon microcavity with Kerr nonlinearity in the ultrastrong-coupling regime. When the lower and upper polariton branches are well separated in energy, the full Hopfield--Rabi--Kerr model reduces to an effective single-mode description of the lower polariton. We analyze the stability of the lower-polariton steady states. We show that the resulting bistability is qualitatively similar to that in the strong-coupling regime. However, in the ultrastrong-coupling regime counter-rotating processes and the diamagnetic A2 term renormalize the polariton spectrum and composition, changing the effective detuning Δ~1 and nonlinearity ULPg-dependency beyond the strong-coupling (RWA) picture. As a result, although the semiclassical bistability criterion keeps its standard Kerr--oscillator form, the turning points and hysteresis window are shifted relative to the strong-coupling prediction.