We revisit the theoretical description of the ultrastrong light-matter interaction in terms of exactly solvable effective Hamiltonians. A perturbative approach based on polaronic and spin-dependent squeezing transformations provides an effective Hamiltonian for the quantum Rabi model up to the second order in the expansion parameter. The model consistently includes both rotating and counter-rotating terms, going therefore beyond the rotating-wave approximation. Analytical and numerical results show that the proposed Hamiltonian performs better than the Bloch-Siegert model when calculating operator averages (e.g., the mean photon number and number of excitations). This improvement is due to a refined calculation of the dressed states within the present model. Regarding the frequency shift induced by the qubit-photon interaction, we find a different sign from the Bloch-Siegert value. This influences the structure of the eigenstates in a nontrivial way and ensures the correct calculation of the number of excitations associated with a given dressed state. As a consistency check, we show that the exactly solvable independent boson model is reproduced as a special limit case of the perturbative Hamiltonian.
We revisit the theoretical description of the ultrastrong light-matter interaction in terms of exactly solvable effective Hamiltonians. A perturbative approach based on polaronic and spin-dependent squeezing transformations provides an effective Hamiltonian for the quantum Rabi model up to the second order in the expansion parameter. The model consistently includes both rotating and counter-rotating terms, going therefore beyond the rotating-wave approximation. Analytical and numerical results show that the proposed Hamiltonian performs better than the Bloch-Siegert model when calculating operator averages (e.g., the mean photon number and number of excitations). This improvement is due to a refined calculation of the dressed states within the present model. Regarding the frequency shift induced by the qubit-photon interaction, we find a different sign from the Bloch-Siegert value. This influences the structure of the eigenstates in a nontrivial way and ensures the correct calculation of the number of excitations associated with a given dressed state. As a consistency check, we show that the exactly solvable independent boson model is reproduced as a special limit case of the perturbative Hamiltonian.
Abstract We apply a simple analytical method based on a unitary transformation to calculate the ground state, its excitation spectrum and quantum dynamic evolution of physical quantities for the double-photon quantum Rabi Hamiltonian over the wide coupling-strength range. The concise analytical method possesses the same mathematical simplicity as the approach of the rotating wave approximation (RWA). By quantitative comparison with the numerically exact result obtained by matrix diagonalization, we confirm that our calculated results obtained by transformed rotating-wave method are not only accurate in the weak coupling regime but also correct in intermediate strong-coupling case. In the intermediate ultrastrong-coupling regime, the calculated values of the ground state and lower lying excited states are nearly the same as the exact ones. It turns out that our calculation for the energy spectrum is beyond the ordinary-RWA. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the signatures resulting from the counter-rotating wave terms by monitoring the population, the coherence, the squeezing of the photon under the ultra-strong conditions. In particular, we find that when the frequency of the photon is much larger than the transition frequency of the system, the lineshape of the time evolution becomes complicated with the increase of the coupling strength, which may be verified experimentally.
The generalized rotating-wave approximation (GRWA) method is extended to the two-qubit quantum Rabi model. In the first-order approximation (one photon exchange), the Hamiltonian matrix in photon number space is simplified by introducing two variational parameters. However, the Hamiltonian matrix is not a diagonalizable matrix yet. Furthermore, by presenting a constraint condition on coupling strength and atomic transition frequency, the Hamiltonian matrix is simplified and an effective solvable Hamiltonian with block diagonal form is obtained. In the even and odd parity space, the energy spectra and eigenstates of the two-qubit quantum Rabi model are achieved analytically. Most of the energy spectra, especially the lower energy levels, agree well with the numerical exact results in ultra-strong coupling region, and the ground state wave function can gives a fairly accurate result of mean photon number.
The interaction between light and matter is one of the oldest research areas of quantum mechanics, and a field that just keeps on delivering new insights and applications. With the arrival of cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamics we can now achieve strong light-matter couplings which form the basis of most implementations of quantum technology. But quantum information processing also has high demands requiring total error rates of fractions of percentage in order to be scalable (fault-tolerant) to useful applications. Since errors can also arise from modelling, this has brought into center stage one of the key approximations of quantum theory, the Rotating Wave Approximation (RWA) of the quantum Rabi model, leading to the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. While the RWA is often very good and incredibly useful to understand light-matter interactions, there is also growing experimental evidence of regimes where it is a bad approximation. Here, we ask and answer a harder question: for which experimental parameters is the RWA, although perhaps qualitatively adequate, already not good enough to match the demands of scalable quantum technology? For example, when is the error at least, and when at most, 1%? To answer this, we develop rigorous non-perturbative bounds taming the RWA. We find that these bounds not only depend, as expected, on the ratio of the coupling strength and the oscillator frequency, but also on the average number of photons in the initial state. This confirms recent experiments on photon-dressed Bloch-Siegert shifts. We argue that with experiments reporting controllable cavity states with hundreds of photons and with quantum error correcting codes exploring more and more of Fock space, this state-dependency of the RWA is increasingly relevant for the field of quantum computation, and our results pave the way towards a better understanding of those experiments.
We propose an extended transformed rotating-wave approximation (ETRWA) for the two-photon quantum Rabi model. This method retains the spin-dependent squeezing transformation and the qubit-frequency-dependent parameter-selection condition of the existing TRWA, but replaces its excitation-independent vacuum coefficients with exact photon-number-dependent diagonal and nearest-neighbour two-photon matrix elements. We compute the energy spectra, mean photon numbers, and eigenstate fidelities using the ETRWA, TRWA, and S-GRWA methods. Comparison with exact numerical results shows that the ETRWA improves the 2017 TRWA most clearly at intermediate coupling. The comparison with the S-GRWA is observable-, detuning-, and coupling-dependent. Near spectral collapse, the S-GRWA is superior because it retains the vanishing soft-mode scale, while the finite-squeeze ETRWA omits interblock processes needed for the softening of the continuum and higher excited states. The ETRWA retains closed 2×2 diagonalizations, with an excitation-dependent finite-sum cost for generating their coefficients.
Generalized squeezing rotating-wave approximation (GSRWA) is proposed by employing both the displacement and the squeezing transformations. A solvable Hamiltonian is reformulated in the same form as the ordinary RWA ones. For a qubit coupled to oscillators experiment, a well-defined Schr\"odinger-cat-like entangled state is given by the displaced-squeezed oscillator state instead of the original displaced state. For the isotropic Rabi case, the mean photon number and the ground-state energy are expressed analytically with additional squeezing terms, exhibiting a substantial improvement of the GSRWA. And the ground-state energy in the anisotropic Rabi model confirms the effectiveness of the GSRWA. Due to the squeezing effect, the GSRWA improves the previous methods only with the displacement transformation in a wide range of coupling strengths even for large atom frequency.
We present a general, nonperturbative method for deriving effective Hamiltonians of arbitrary order for periodically driven systems based on an iterated integration-by-parts technique. The resulting family of effective Hamiltonians reproduces the well-known Floquet-Magnus expansion, now enhanced with explicit error bounds that quantify the distance between the exact and approximate dynamics at each order, even in cases where the Floquet-Magnus series fails to converge. We apply the method to the semiclassical Rabi model and provide explicit error bounds for both the Bloch-Siegert Hamiltonian and its third-order refinement. Our analysis shows that, while the rotating-wave approximation more accurately captures the true dynamics than the Bloch-Siegert Hamiltonian in most regimes, the third-order approximation ultimately outperforms both.