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arXiv:2605.02412

Perturbative Analysis of Dark State Dynamics in Weakly Anharmonic Photon-Emitter Pairs

Christopher Campbell, Matti Silveri

quant-phSubmitted May 4, 2026• Announced May 5, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · May 4, 2026v2 · May 5, 2026
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Abstract

Dark states are excited quantum states that decouple from their environment in such a way that they do not emit or absorb external photons. These states are found in a variety of different open quantum systems and can be derived from the collective interactions of individual quantum emitters interacting with one another. One of the simplest model where these states exist is in a pair of dissipatively coupled harmonic oscillators described under the Bose-Hubbard model. When on-site interactions are included, these states can no longer be classified as genuine dark states since dissipation is induced in them. In this paper we study the origin of this dissipation in dark states by using weak anharmonicity as a perturbing factor. In our analysis, we find the first and second order corrections to the wavefunction and apply these corrections to the master equation in order to track the dynamics.

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11 pages, 6 figures

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Dark states are excited quantum states that decouple from their environment in such a way that they do not emit or absorb external photons. These states are found in a variety of different open quantum systems and can be derived from the collective interactions of individual quantum emitters interacting with one another. One of the simplest model where these states exist is in a pair of dissipatively coupled harmonic oscillators described under the Bose-Hubbard model. When on-site interactions are included, these states can no longer be classified as genuine dark states since dissipation is induced in them. In this paper we study the origin of this dissipation in dark states by using weak anharmonicity as a perturbing factor. In our analysis, we find the first and second order corrections to the wavefunction and apply these corrections to the master equation in order to track the dynamics.
Abstract Dark states are excited quantum states that decouple from their environment in such a way that they do not emit or absorb external photons. These states are found in a variety of different open quantum systems and can be derived from the collective interactions of individual quantum emitters interacting with one another. One of the simplest model where these states exist is in a pair of dissipatively coupled harmonic oscillators described under the Bose–Hubbard model. When on-site interactions are included, these states can no longer be classified as genuine dark states since dissipation is induced in them. In this paper we investigate how weak anharmonicity contributes to the introduction of dissipation to the dark states through a perturbative treatment of the system from its harmonic oscillator basis to a weakly anharmonic regime. In our results, we show how anharmonicity allows the dark states to couple to dissipative states through the collective modes of the system. We also observe a symmetry-based selection rule for the perturbation. Finally, comparison to fully numerical results shows that relaxation dynamics predicted by the perturbative approach stays sufficiently accurate in the weakly anharmonic regime.
The interaction between light and matter has captivated physicists for centuries, from early studies of vision and refraction in ancient Greece to the development of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics in the past century. While the response of a single quantum emitter to light is well understood, the radiative properties of an ensemble of closely spaced emitters are far more intricate. Coupling to a shared electromagnetic environment induces coherent and dissipative interactions between emitters, giving rise to a collective response that cannot be captured by treating them independently. In the regime of few excitations, the system hosts delocalized subradiant states, that is, coherent superpositions that are largely decoupled from the electromagnetic field and thus decay at suppressed rates. While this weak coupling makes subradiant states attractive for quantum technologies, it also renders them difficult to manipulate. At higher excitation densities, the intrinsic nonlinearity of emitters and the exponential growth of the Hilbert space make theoretical and numerical descriptions of the system and its dynamics increasingly challenging. This thesis explores two fundamental questions: How can subradiant and dark states be selectively accessed and harnessed for practical applications in quantum technologies? And how can interacting ensembles of quantum emitters be efficiently simulated to uncover their many-body physics? The first part of the thesis develops protocols for controlling and addressing dark states in free-space and waveguide-coupled atomic arrays, demonstrating their utility in quantum storage and the deterministic generation of entangled photonic states. Incorporating atomic motion, we further show that collective subradiant states can enhance cooling in dense atomic arrays, offering new avenues for controlling motional dynamics. In the second part, we introduce cumulant expansions of the equations of motion as a powerful tool to analytically and numerically investigate collective decay in the many-body regime. We first examine the collective decay of fully excited atomic arrays in free space, characterizing the onset and scaling of the superradiant burst across different geometries. In collaboration with experiments on ultracold erbium atoms in optical lattices, we provide the first direct observations of many-body collective effects in free-space ordered arrays, including early-time superradiant bursts, late-time subradiant tails, and the emergence of atomic correlations throughout the dynamics. Finally, we theoretically and numerically explore the transient formation of multi-excitation subradiant states, and demonstrate how the existence of multiple dissipation channels suppresses steady-state superradiance in extended arrays.
In one-dimensional waveguide quantum electrodynamics systems, quantum emitters interact through infinite-range, dispersive, and dissipative dipole-dipole interactions mediated by guided photonic modes. These long-range periodic interactions give rise to rich many-body physics absent in free space. In this work, we construct a set of symmetrized multiexcitation dark states and derive analytic expressions for their time-evolution projections. This framework captures the essential dynamics of excitation transport and storage while significantly reducing computational complexity compared to full master equation simulations. Our analysis reveals a fundamental bound on energy redistribution governed by the structure of dark states and collective dissipation and discovers that optimal excitation transfer between emitter ensembles converges toward an initial pumped fraction of ${N}_{\text{p}}/N\ensuremath{\approx}0.55$ for large system sizes. We further examine the robustness of this mechanism under realistic imperfections, including positional disorder, nonradiative decay, and dephasing. These results highlight the role of many-body dark states in enabling efficient and controllable energy transfer, offering new insights into dissipative many-body dynamics in integrated quantum platforms.
We study quantum dynamics of many-qubit systems strongly coupled to a quantized electromagnetic cavity field in the presence of decoherence and dissipation for both quantum emitters and cavity photons, taking into account the varying coupling strength of different qubits to the cavity field and the spread of their transition frequencies. Compact analytic solutions for time-dependent quantum state amplitudes and observables are derived for a broad class of open quantum systems in Lindblad approximation with the use of the stochastic Schr\"odinger equation approach. We show that depending on the initial quantum state preparation, an ensemble of qubits can evolve into a rich variety of many-qubit entangled states with destructive or constructive interference between the qubits. In particular, when only a small fraction of qubits are initially excited, the dissipation in a cavity will inevitably drive the system into robust dark states that are completely decoupled from the cavity and live much longer than the decay time of the cavity field. We also determine the conditions under which coherent coupling to the quantized cavity field overcomes the dephasing caused by a spread of transition frequencies in multiqubit systems and leads to the formation of a decoupled dark state.
We introduce a functional perturbative method for treating weakly nonlinear systems coupled with a quantum field bath. We demonstrate using this method to obtain the covariance matrix elements and the correlation functions of a quantum anharmonic oscillator interacting with a heat bath. We identify a fluctuation-dissipation relation based on the nonequilibrium dynamics of this nonlinear open quantum system. To establish its connection with dynamical equilibration, we further examine the energy flows between the anharmonic oscillator and the bath field. The vanishing of the net flow is an indication of the existence of an equilibrium state for such an open-system configuration. The results presented here are useful for studying the nonequilibrium physical processes of nonlinear quantum systems such as heat transfer or electron transport.
We investigate the perturbative expansions of the ground-state wavefunctions of the quantum anharmonic oscillators. With an appropriate change of spatial scale, the weak-coupling Schrödinger equation is transformed to an equivalent strong-coupling one. The Friedberg–Lee–Zhao method is applied to obtain the improved perturbative expansions. These perturbative expansions give a correction to the WKB results for large spatial distances, and reproduce the conventional weak-coupling results for small spatial distances.