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arXiv:2102.05941 · Physical Review Research

Probing nonclassical light fields with energetic witnesses in waveguide quantum electrodynamics

Maria Maffei, Patrice A. Camati, Alexia Auffèves

Published Sep 24, 2021• 27 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose an operational scenario to characterize the nature of energy exchanges between two coupled but otherwise isolated quantum systems.Defining work as the component stemming from effective unitary interactions performed by each system on one another, the remnant is stored in the correlations and generally prevents full energy extraction by local operations.Focusing on the case of a qubit coupled to the light field of a waveguide, we establish a bound relating work exchange and local energy extraction when the light statistics is coherent, and that gets violated in the presence of a quantum light pulse.Our results provide operational, energy-based witnesses to probe nonclassical resources.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.3.l032073

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We propose an operational scenario to characterize the nature of energy exchanges between two coupled but otherwise isolated quantum systems.Defining work as the component stemming from effective unitary interactions performed by each system on one another, the remnant is stored in the correlations and generally prevents full energy extraction by local operations.Focusing on the case of a qubit coupled to the light field of a waveguide, we establish a bound relating work exchange and local energy extraction when the light statistics is coherent, and that gets violated in the presence of a quantum light pulse.Our results provide operational, energy-based witnesses to probe nonclassical resources.
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We analyze work extraction from a qubit into a waveguide (WG) acting as a battery, where work is the coherent component of the energy radiated by the qubit. The process is stimulated by a wave packet whose mean photon number (the battery's charge) can be adjusted. We show that the extracted work is bounded by the qubit's ergotropy, and that the bound is saturated for a large enough battery's charge. If this charge is small, work can still be extracted. Its amount is controlled by the quantum coherence initially injected in the qubit's state, that appears as a key parameter when energetic resources are limited. This new and autonomous scenario for the study of quantum batteries can be implemented with state-of-the-art artificial qubits coupled to WGs.
Understanding physical properties of quantum emitters strongly interacting with quantized electromagnetic modes is one of the primary goals in the emergent field of waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED). When the light-matter coupling strength is comparable to or even exceeds energies of elementary excitations, conventional approaches based on perturbative treatment of light-matter interactions, two-level description of matter excitations, and photon-number truncation are no longer sufficient. Here we study in and out of equilibrium properties of waveguide QED in such nonperturbative regimes on the basis of a comprehensive and rigorous theoretical approach using an asymptotic decoupling unitary transformation. We uncover several surprising features ranging from symmetry-protected many-body bound states in the continuum to strong renormalization of the effective mass and potential; the latter may explain recent experiments demonstrating cavity-induced changes in chemical reactivity as well as enhancements of ferromagnetism or superconductivity. To illustrate our general results with concrete examples, we use our formalism to study a model of coupled cavity arrays, which is relevant to experiments in superconducting qubits interacting with microwave resonators or atoms coupled to photonic crystals. We examine the relation between our results and delocalization-localization transition in the spin-boson model; notably, we point out that a reentrant transition can occur in the regimes where the coupling strength becomes the dominant energy scale. We also discuss applications of our results to other problems in different fields, including quantum optics, condensed matter physics, and quantum chemistry.
We investigate nonequilibrium energy transport and nonclassical correlations of photons in a nonequilibrium two-mode circuit quantum electrodynamic system with noncommutative qubit-photon couplings. Our calculations include a quantum master equation, which can handle ultrastrong qubit-photon interactions. For weak qubit-photon couplings, the nonmonotonic behavior of nonequilibrium energy flow is explored for large temperature bias, stemming from the breakdown of microscopic energy transition cycles. Two distinct scaling features of the coupling parameters in energy currents are analytically shown. Moreover, the longitudinal qubit-photon coupling shows a dramatic contribution to the exhibition of antibunching behaviors of autocorrelation and violation of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality of the cross correlation of photons. These results may provide insight into quantum energy modulation devices and photon correlation manipulation in circuit quantum electrodynamics.
We develop a theoretical description of quantum wave mixing (QWM) in a cascaded waveguide-QED system of two superconducting qubits, where the probe is driven by an external coherent tone and by the resonance fluorescence of a strongly driven source qubit. Starting from the field correlation functions of the source emission, we derive an effective master-equation treatment for the probe and identify the regime in which the incident fluorescence is characterized by anomalous correlations. When the coherent Rayleigh component of the source spectrum is suppressed, the probe equations of motion become equivalent to those for a qubit driven by a coherent tone and broadband squeezed light, although the ligt emitted by the source is non-Gaussian and antibunched. This equivalence implies a selection rule for the peaks of the QWM spectrum, with a strong suppression of sidebands associated with processes involving an odd number of photons taken from the source field. Numerical simulations of the full cascaded two-qubit model for different ratios of radiative decay rates unambiguously confirm the participation of correlated photon pairs in QWM processes. The current research illustrates that the analysis of peak amplitudes can be used to probe photon statistics in the incident nonclassical field.