The quantum Rabi model (QRM) is a fundamental model for light-matter interactions. A fascinating feature of the QRM is that it manifests a quantum phase transition which is applicable for critical quantum metrology (CQM). Effective application for CQM needs the exact location of the transition point, however the conventional expression for transition coupling is only valid in the extreme limit of low frequency, while apart from zero frequency an accurate location is still lacking. In the present work we conversely use the quantum Fisher information (QFI) in the CQM to identify the transition coupling, which reveals that transition coupling indeed deviates greatly from the conventional one once a finite frequency is turned on. Polaron picture is applied to analytically reproduce the numeric QFI. An accurate expression for the transition coupling is obtained by inspiration from the revealed fractional-power-law effect of polaron frequency renormalization. From the QFI in the polaron picture we find that the transition occurs around a point where the effective velocity and the susceptibility of the expected value of mode quadrature reach maximum. Our result provides an accurate reference of transition couplings for quantum metrology at nonzero frequencies. The formulation of the QFI in the polaron picture also prepares an analytic method with an accurate compensation for the parameter regime difficult to access for the numerics. Besides the integer/fractional-power-law analysis to extract the underlying physics of transition, the QFI/velocity relation may also add some insight in bridging the QFI and transition observables.
The quantum Rabi model (QRM) is a fundamental model for light-matter interactions. A fascinating feature of the QRM is that it manifests a quantum phase transition which is applicable for critical quantum metrology (CQM). Effective application for CQM needs the exact location of the transition point, however the conventional expression for transition coupling is only valid in the extreme limit of low frequency, while apart from zero frequency an accurate location is still lacking. In the present work we conversely use the quantum Fisher information (QFI) in the CQM to identify the transition coupling, which reveals that transition coupling indeed deviates greatly from the conventional one once a finite frequency is turned on. Polaron picture is applied to analytically reproduce the numeric QFI. An accurate expression for the transition coupling is obtained by inspiration from the revealed fractional-power-law effect of polaron frequency renormalization. From the QFI in the polaron picture we find that the transition occurs around a point where the effective velocity and the susceptibility of the expected value of mode quadrature reach maximum. Our result provides an accurate reference of transition couplings for quantum metrology at nonzero frequencies. The formulation of the QFI in the polaron picture also prepares an analytic method with an accurate compensation for the parameter regime difficult to access for the numerics. Besides the integer/fractional-power-law analysis to extract the underlying physics of transition, the QFI/velocity relation may also add some insight in bridging the QFI and transition observables.
Abstract The light–matter interaction not only is ubiquitous in nature but also can be simulated in various artificial systems. Besides the tunability of artificial quantum systems, the experimental access to the ultra‐strong and even deep‐strong couplings has brought a regime with novel phenomenology. Theoretically the finding of the integrability for the quantum Rabi model (QRM) has attracted tremendous attention to the study of the QRM and its extensions which are fundamental models of the light–matter interaction. With the continuing enhancements of coupling strengths, a most fascinating phenomenon of these light–matter models is that they can exhibit few‐body quantum phase transitions (QPTs), while a full understanding of these QPTs is a challenge. The polaron picture is a method capable of analyzing these fundamental models in the entire coupling regime and extracting the essential physics behind the QPTs. A review of its extensive applications on the fundamental light–matter models is presented, with discussions on the phase diagrams and QPT‐related features. The universality of critical exponent of the anisotropic QRM as well as the possibility of QPTs in A 2 terms are also addressed.
The experimental access to ultra-strong couplings in light-matter interactions has made the quantum phase transition (QPT) in the quantum Rabi model practically relevant, while the physics of the QPT has not yet been fully explored. The polaron picture is a method capable of analyzing in the entire coupling regime and extracting the essential physics behind the QPT. However, the asymmetric deformation of polarons is missing in the current polaron picture. In the present work we propose an improved variational method in asymmetric polaron picture (APP). Our APP not only increases the method accuracy but also reveals more underlying physics concerning the QPT. We find that in the ground state both the polarons and antipolarons are asymmetrically deformed to a large extent, which leads to a richer phase diagram. We also analyze the first excited state in which we unveil an asymmetry direction reversal for the polarons and an attraction/replusion transition differently from the ground state. Finally, we apply the APP in quantum Fisher information analysis and critical coupling extraction, the improvements indicate that the polaron asymmetry makes a considerable contribution to the quantum resource in quantum metrology and plays an unnegligible role in the QPT. Our results and mechanism clarifications expose more subtle energy competitions and abundant physics, and the method potentially might have broader applications in light-matter interactions.
Quantum Rabi model (QRM) is a fundamental model for light-matter interactions, the finite-component quantum phase transition (QPT) in the QRM has established a paradigmatic application for critical quantum metrology (CQM). However, such a paradigmatic application is restricted to a local regime of the QPT which has only a single critical point. In this work we propose a globalized CQM in the QRM by introducing an auxiliary nonlinear term which is realizable and can extend the critical point to a continuous critical regime. As a consequence, a high measurement precision is globally available over the entire coupling regime from the original critical point of the QRM down to the weak-coupling limit, as demonstrated by the globally accessible diverging quantum Fisher information in dynamics. We illustrate a measurement scheme by quadrature dynamics, with globally criticality-enhanced inverted variance as well as the scaling relation with respect to finite frequencies. In particular, we find that the globally high measurement precisions still survive in the presence of decoherence. Our proposal paves a way to break the local limitation of QPT of the QRM in CQM and enables a broader application, with implications of applicability in realistic situation.
We employ a polaron picture to investigate the properties of the two-photon quantum Rabi model (QRM), which describes a two-level or spin-half system coupled with a single bosonic mode by a two-photon process. In the polaron picture, the coupling in the two-photon process leads to spin-related asymmetry so that the original single bosonic mode splits into two separated frequency modes for the opposite spins, which correspond to two bare polarons. Importantly, the tunneling causes these two bare polarons to exchange their components with each other, thus leading to additional induced polarons. According to this picture, the variational ground-state wave function of the two-photon QRM can be correctly constructed, with the ground-state energy and other physical observables in good agreement with the exact numerics in all the coupling regimes. Furthermore, generalization to multiple induced polarons involving higher orders in the tunneling effect provides a systematic way to yield a rapid convergence in accuracy even around the difficult spectral collapse point. In addition, the polaron picture provides a distinctive understanding of an incomplete spectral collapse behavior that is about the existence of discrete energy levels apart from the collapsed spectrum at the spectral collapse point. This work illustrates that the polaron picture is helpful to capture the key physics in this nonlinear light-matter interaction model and indicates that this method can be applicable to more complicated QRM-related models.
The quantum Rabi model (QRM) with linear coupling between light mode and qubit exhibits the analog of a second-order phase transition for vanishing mode frequency which allows for criticality-enhanced quantum metrology in a few-body system. We show that the QRM including a nonlinear coupling term exhibits much higher measurement precisions due to its first-order-like phase transition at finite frequency, avoiding the detrimental slowing-down effect close to the critical point of the linear QRM. When a bias term is added to the Hamiltonian, the system can be used as a fluxmeter or magnetometer if implemented in circuit QED platforms.
The ground state of quantum Rabi model (QRM) exhibits rich nonclassical states including squeezed state, cat state, and entangled state in different parameter regimes. In this paper, we firstly use the polaron picture to figure out the process of superradiant phase transition (SPT) in view of the nonclassical states. According to the polaron wave functions, the squeezed state extends to whole parameter regimes, and a small but non-zero weighted antipolaron is necessary to form novel semi-cat states. Moreover, the behavior of superradiance in the QRM can be viewed as the same displacement of the cat states from zero to a finite value, while the ground state becomes entangled state resulting from the emergence of spin-up state. On the other hand, the nonclassical states can be intuitively characterized by the Wigner functions with analytical expressions in the polaron picture, and the Wigner negativity is also evaluated to measure the nonclassicality. Based on the squeezing and superradiance, a classification of the coupling strength for the nonclassical states containing in the ground state is presented, and the process of the SPT is also revealed by the photon number distribution in Fock space, which is important to understand the fundamental quantum physics in the QRM. Our work provides a guidance for preparing the nonclassical states in experiments based on the QRM.