We discuss the generation of a Schrödinger cat in a nanocavity created by the coupling of an electromagnetic mode with an exciton in a quantum dot considering the dispersive limit of the Jaynes–Cummings model. More than the generation itself, we focus on the effects of the environment over the bosonic state in the nanocavity, which has losses simulated by coupling with two different kinds of reservoirs. In the first case, the interaction of the system with a finite reservoir shows that fragments of different sizes of the reservoir deliver the same amount of information about the physical system in the dynamics of the birth and death of the Schrödinger cat. The second case considers a structured reservoir, whose spectral density varies significantly with frequency. This situation becomes relevant in solid-state devices where quantum channels are embedded, as memory effects generally cannot be neglected. Under these circumstances, it is observed that the dynamics can differ substantially from the Markovian, presenting oscillations related to the average number of photons. These oscillations influence the information flow between the system and the environment, evidenced here by the measurement of non-Markovianity.
We discuss the generation of a Schrödinger cat in a nanocavity created by the coupling of an electromagnetic mode with an exciton in a quantum dot considering the dispersive limit of the Jaynes–Cummings model. More than the generation itself, we focus on the effects of the environment over the bosonic state in the nanocavity, which has losses simulated by coupling with two different kinds of reservoirs. In the first case, the interaction of the system with a finite reservoir shows that fragments of different sizes of the reservoir deliver the same amount of information about the physical system in the dynamics of the birth and death of the Schrödinger cat. The second case considers a structured reservoir, whose spectral density varies significantly with frequency. This situation becomes relevant in solid-state devices where quantum channels are embedded, as memory effects generally cannot be neglected. Under these circumstances, it is observed that the dynamics can differ substantially from the Markovian, presenting oscillations related to the average number of photons. These oscillations influence the information flow between the system and the environment, evidenced here by the measurement of non-Markovianity.
Abstract By virtue of the superoperator technique, we solve analytically the non-Markovian master equation that describes single-mode continuous variable system interacting with a structure reservoir. Our analytical solution allows us to investigate the non-Markovian effects on the dynamics of quantum coherence and non-classicality of Schrödinger cat states embedded in various types of structured reservoirs. We show that the dynamical behaviors of the fidelity, entanglement potentials, and higher-order antibunching of such states can be divided into two phases: they decay rapidly within a short time, but would either vanish completely or tend to a nonzero steady-state value in the long-time limit depending on the initial Schrödinger cat states and system parameters. We also show that by examining the Wigner function and higher-order sub-Poissonian statistics, the super-Ohmic environment can better help to protect the non-classicality, whereas the sub-Ohmic environment causes the disappearance of the non-classicality. Our approach is concise and can generalize to other open quantum system coupled to non-Markovian environment at finite-temperature or to linear non-Markovian Gaussian system.
Entanglement in continuous-variable Gaussian systems is a key resource, and common reservoirs can both suppress and generate correlations. Existing work focused on pre-entangled states or Markovian baths, leaving open whether separable squeezed inputs entangle in structured environments or under modulation. We study two bosonic modes coupled to a common reservoir, each initialized in a separable squeezed vacuum. Dynamics are analyzed utilizing Gaussian covariance methods, evolved under approximate Non-Markovian quantum state diffusion (QSD), finite-temperature pseudomode embeddings, and Bures-based non-Markovian diagnostics. We identify three mechanisms absent in Markovian dynamics: (1) A detuning condition that freezes entanglement trajectories across reservoir correlation times; (2) birth, death, and revival of entanglement from orthogonal inputs; and (3) integer-locked beating with square-wave oscillations produced by periodic detuning. All mechanisms persist at finite temperature, with deviations bounded within 5% in cryogenic regimes and 20% at moderate occupations. These deviation bounds align with cryogenic cavity, phononic, and optomechanical platforms, where structured spectral densities and detuning modulation are already accessible. Structured reservoirs are shown to emerge as tunable entanglement resources for continuous-variable quantum technologies.
Understanding the non-Markovian dynamics of dissipative processes induced by memory effects of the environment is a fundamental subject of open quantum systems. Because of the complexity of open quantum systems, e.g., the multiple energy scales involving that of the system, the environment, and their mutual coupling, it is generally a challenging task to characterize the relationship among the parameters of the system dynamics and the reservoir spectra. For the two-level spontaneous emission model within structured environments, it was shown in a recent literature (Opt. Lett. 38, 3650) that a functional relation could be established between the asymptotically non-decaying population and the spectral density of the reservoir as the system undergoes a long-time evolution. It hence renders a distinct perspective to look into the character of long-lived quantum coherence in the corresponding non-Markovian process. This article is devoted to further investigate the phenomena of limit cycle oscillations possibly occurring in such non-Markovian dissipative systems in a long-time evolution. For a two-level system subjected to an environment with Ohmic class spectra, due to the presence of a unique bound-state mode of the system, the evolution trajectory of the given initial states will converge to a limit cycle in the Bloch space. The dependence of the radius and the location of the limit cycle on the spectral density function of the reservoir are manifested by virtue of the described functional relation. For the model subjected to a photonic crystal environment with multiple bands, our studies reveal that, owing to the presence of two or more bound states, the evolution trajectory of the system will converge to a toric curve of a paraboloid in the Bloch space and the phenomena of periodic or quasi-periodic oscillations could exhibit. While the equation of the parabolic curve is fully determined by the initial values of the state vector in the Bloch space, our results reveal that the scope of the evolution trajectory inside the toric curve is related to the spectral density of the reservoir and their quantified relation is distinctly characterized. Finally, the asymptotic dynamics of the correlations of a two-qubit system is discussed when it is subjected locally to the non-Markovian dissipative process.
In this manuscript, we study the Schrödinger cat state transfer in a quantum optical version of Newton's cradle in non-Markovian environment. Based on a non-Markovian master equation, we show that the cat state can be transferred purely through the memory effect of the non-Markovian common environment, even without any direct couplings between neighbor cavities. The mechanism of the environment induced cat state transfer is analyzed both analytically and numerically to demonstrate that the transfer is a unique phenomenon in non-Markovian regime. From this example, the non-Markovian environment is shown to be qualitatively different from the Markovian environment reflected by the finite versus zero residue coherence. Besides, we also show the influence of environmental parameters are crucial for the transfer. We hope the cat state transfer studied in this work may shed more light on the fundamental difference between non-Markovian and Markovian environments.
This thesis investigates two thematic lines of research, both underpinned by non-Markovian system-reservoir interactions in quantum optics. The overarching focus is on modelling the open system dynamics in a non-perturbative fashion, broadly on - though not restricted to - instances when the environment is structured. A theory is developed by means of enlarging the open system over environmental degrees of freedom to include memory effects in its dynamics. This is achieved using an established technique that involves mapping a bosonic environment onto a 1D chain of harmonic oscillators. Within this setting, we apply a Heisenberg equation-of-motion approach to derive an exact set coupled differential equations for the open system and a single auxiliary oscillator of the chain. The combined equations are shown to have their interpretation rooted in a quantum Markov stochastic process. Including the auxiliary chain oscillator as part of the original system then enables us to obtain an exact master equation for the enlarged system, avoiding any need for the Born-Markov approximations. Our method is valid for a dissipative two-state system, with cases of multiple excitations and added driving discussed. Separately, we apply the framework of quantum Darwinism to an atom-cavity system, and, subsequently, to a more general multiple-environment model. In both cases, the time-dependent spread of correlations between the open system and fractions of the environment is analysed during the course of the decoherence process. The degree to which information is redundant across different fractions is checked to infer the emergence of classicality. In the second case, we go further and present a decomposition of information in terms of its quantum and classical correlations. A quantitative measure of redundancy is also studied with regard to its ability to witness non-Markovian behaviour. Besides fundamental interest, our results have application to quantum information processing and quantum technologies, keeping in mind the potential beneficial use of non-Markovian effects in reservoir engineering.
We study the non-Markovian dispersive readout of a single-mode bosonic (SMB) quantum system coupled to the open cavity with two non-Markovian environments. Assuming that the SMB quantum system is initially prepared in a thermal equilibrium state, the susceptibility of the measured SMB quantum system to the cavity can be obtained by the nonequilibrium linear response theory, which provides the dispersive frequency shift of the cavity. We analytically derive the transmission and reflection of the cavity in the non-Markovian regime and discuss the non-Markovian dispersive readout of the SMB quantum system, which is in good agreement with that obtained by the Markovian approximation. We show that the effect of non-Markovian dynamics on the system's behavior leads to the decrease of the transmission and shifts of the frequency corresponding to the peak of the transmission in the dispersive regime compared with the Markovian case and the increase of the sum of the transmission and reflection due to the excitation backflowing induced by the couplings of the cavity and two non-Markovian environments, which could be applied to quantum secure direct communication with quantum memory. Finally, we generalize the readout theory to the periodically driven SMB quantum system based on the Floquet theory and quantum network, which contain all influences from the non-Markovian environments. The formalism presented in this paper opens an alternative field of possible applications in quantum information and quantum communication with non-Markovianity by manipulating the spectral densities of the environments.