We present an analytical and numerical Floquet treatment of a driven polar two-level quantum system characterized by both longitudinal and transverse coupling to a periodic field. Analytically, we derive a dressed-frame effective Hamiltonian up to first order in the inverse driving frequency, incorporating the longitudinal coupling nonperturbatively. This yields closed expressions for the effective transverse coupling strength and the effective detuning, both of which are modified by the presence of the longitudinal interaction. In the nonpolar limit, these expressions recover the usual near-resonant Rabi coupling and the Bloch-Siegert shift. As a second main result, we develop a numerical flow-equation framework that yields a time-independent effective Hamiltonian across a broad range of transverse and longitudinal coupling strengths. This dual framework is relevant for a variety of platforms, including driven polar quantum systems, optical lattices, superconducting circuits, and solids subject to surface acoustic waves.
We present an analytical and numerical Floquet treatment of a driven polar two-level quantum system characterized by both longitudinal and transverse coupling to a periodic field. Analytically, we derive a dressed-frame effective Hamiltonian up to first order in the inverse driving frequency, incorporating the longitudinal coupling nonperturbatively. This yields closed expressions for the effective transverse coupling strength and the effective detuning, both of which are modified by the presence of the longitudinal interaction. In the nonpolar limit, these expressions recover the usual near-resonant Rabi coupling and the Bloch-Siegert shift. As a second main result, we develop a numerical flow-equation framework that yields a time-independent effective Hamiltonian across a broad range of transverse and longitudinal coupling strengths. This dual framework is relevant for a variety of platforms, including driven polar quantum systems, optical lattices, superconducting circuits, and solids subject to surface acoustic waves.
Floquet theory combined with the generalized Van Vleck nearly degenerate perturbation theory has been widely employed for studying various two-level systems that are driven by external fields via time-dependent longitudinal (i.e., diagonal) couplings. However, three-level systems strongly driven by time-dependent transverse (i.e., off-diagonal) couplings have rarely been investigated, due to the breakdown of the traditional rotating wave approximation. Meanwhile, the conventional perturbation theory is not directly applicable, since a small parameter for the perturbed part is no longer apparent. Here we develop a double-unitary-transformation approach to deal with periodically modulated and strongly driven systems, where the time-dependent Hamiltonian has large off-diagonal elements. The first unitary transformation converts strong off-diagonal elements to diagonal ones, and the second enables us to harness the generalized Van Vleck perturbation theory to deal with the transformed Floquet matrix and also allows us to reduce the infinite-dimensional Floquet Hamiltonian to a finite effective one. For a strongly modulated three-level system, with the combination of the Floquet theory and the transformed generalized Van Vleck perturbation theory, we obtain analytical results of the system, which agree well with exact numerical solutions. This method offers a useful tool to analytically study multilevel systems with strong transverse couplings.
The extended quantum Rabi models make a significant contribution to understanding of the quantum nature of the atom-light interaction. We transform two kinds of extended quantum Rabi model, the anisotropic Rabi model and the asymmetric Rabi model, into the rotating frame and regard them as periodically driven quantum systems. The analytical solutions of the quasienergy spectrum as well as the Floquet modes for both models are constructed by applying the Floquet theory and the high-frequency expansion, which is applied to the nonstroboscopic dynamics of physical observables such as atomic inversion, transverse magnetization, and atom-field correlation. For the anisotropic Rabi model, the quasienergy fits well with the numerical results even when the rotating-wave coupling is in the deep strong-coupling regime $g\ensuremath{\simeq}\ensuremath{\hbar}\ensuremath{\omega}$ if the counter-rotating term is small enough compared to the driving frequency. Avoided level crossing may occur for quasienergy with the same parity when the positive branch spectrum lines for the total excitation number N cross the negative branch lines for N+2, while the high-frequency expansion fails to predict this due to the conservation of the total excitation number. Furthermore, we present analytical and numerical studies of the long-time evolution of population and conclude that the analytical method is credible for the population dynamics. For the asymmetric Rabi model, we find that the external bias field which breaks the parity symmetry of the total excitation number tends to cluster the upper and lower branches into two bundles, and the detuning induced gap in the first temporal Brillouin zone shows a quadratic dependence on the bias. Fourier analysis is applied to extract the frequency composition and two-frequency driving behavior is revealed. Varying the bias strength will change the time-averaged value of the oscillation, which shows how the bias competes with the detuning and atom-field coupling in the driving dynamics. Both models prove that treating the Hamiltonian in the rotating frame by Floquet theory gives an alternative tool in the study of interaction between atom and light.
The Floquet-Magnus expansion is a widely used tool to derive effective descriptions of time-periodic quantum systems by approximating their dynamics with a time-independent Hamiltonian. However, its standard formulation is, strictly speaking, restricted to bounded Hamiltonians. In this work, we extend its definition and analysis to a broad class of time-periodic unbounded Hamiltonians. Our approach is based on an a priori distinct nonperturbative framework for the construction of effective Hamiltonians, which we show to reproduce the Floquet-Magnus expansion. A particular strength of our framework is that it allows us to prove that the resulting effective dynamics approximates the original time evolution propagators to arbitrary order in the high-frequency limit without requiring convergence of the Floquet-Magnus expansion, a condition that is already highly restrictive even in the bounded setting. We illustrate the scope of the method on representative models: the quantum Rabi Hamiltonian in the interaction picture, and the periodically driven quantum harmonic oscillator.
We theoretically study the dynamics and resonance shift of the Rabi model with frequency modulation, i.e., the Rabi model driven additionally by a slow longitudinal field, by using the counterrotating-hybridized rotating-wave (CHRW) method, aiming to illustrate the effects of the counterrotating (CR) terms of the transverse field. The CHRW method is based on a unitary transformation and reduces the aperiodic Hamiltonian to an effective periodic Hamiltonian that can be efficiently treated by Floquet theory. The validity of the effective Hamiltonian and widely used rotating-wave approximation (RWA) Hamiltonian is carefully examined compared to the numerically exact results over a wide parameter range. It is found that the effective Hamiltonian gives a correct description, while the RWA breaks down in the strong driving regime. Interestingly, we show that under certain conditions the longitudinal field can be used to modify resonance widths such that resonance widths can be comparable to the magnitude of the Bloch-Siegert (BS) shift, which in turn makes the CR-induced BS shift significant and leads to the complete breakdown of the RWA even in a moderately strong driving regime (in which the RWA holds for the Rabi model without frequency modulation). In addition, by using the effective Hamiltonian, we can efficiently access resonance positions for the bichromatically driven qubit and study how the resonance shifts due to the combined effects of the CR terms and frequency modulation. For a weak longitudinal field, we show that resonance positions can be analytically calculated from the effective Rabi frequency for the effective Hamiltonian, which are in excellent agreement with the numerically exact results.
Time-periodic quantum systems are present all over science and technology. They have been successfully studied using Floquet theory, and a broad diversity of interesting phenomena such as coherent destruction of tunnelling, dynamical localization and creation of new phases of matter have been discovered. Furthermore, periodic driving has also been introduced as a tool for engineering novel quantum systems that have no static analogue. Besides these remarkable achievements for isolated systems, in reality, systems always interact with their surroundings. Taking the effect of the environment into account, time-periodic quantum systems have been mainly described using the Floquet-Markov approach, which consists in deriving a weak coupling master equation in the Floquet basis. In this thesis, we focus on how to overcome these standard approximations in the description of driven open quantum systems. We start by providing a general review on the topics of isolated driven systems, open quantum systems and the Floquet-Markov approach, before presenting the main results of this work. Under the effect of high-frequency driving, we provide an analytic solution to a large class of open quantum systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and grants access to the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom. The solution can be interpreted as the stroboscopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian. This provides a flexible simulation procedure of nontrivial Hamiltonians. The results are exemplified with the driven spin-boson model, where a coherent control of dissipation is observed. By a novel combination of Floquet theory, full counting statistics and a Markovian embedding strategy (reaction coordinate mapping), more intricate scenarios with additional driven system-environment interactions are addressed. Hereby, we can access the dynamics and thermodynamics of a periodically driven thermal machine. For the particular case where the working medium is a two-level system, we identify four different operating regimes, including a heat engine and a refrigerator. As the coupling strength is increased, their efficiency and coefficient of performance decrease and the refrigerator regime disappears. Notably, our model reproduces the setup of laser cooling of trapped ions in a specific parameter limit. Following the same combination of methods, we investigate electron pumping through a single quantum dot with periodically modulated energy and tunnelling amplitudes. In the high-frequency regime, the direction of the current can be controlled with the driving phase and a rectification effect that is exclusive to the non-Markovian character of the model is observed. In the low-frequency regime, we apply an additional transformation to view the model as three independent transport channels and observe that the coupling strength also controls the current direction. Studying charge fluctuations we validate that our model behaves as a single-electron source.
We study driven and open quantum systems described by a time-periodic Lindblad master equation. In closed systems, the stroboscopic dynamics can always be described by an effective time-independent Floquet Hamiltonian; this idea is the basis of Floquet engineering. However, in the presence of dissipation, the existence of an effective time-independent Floquet Lindbladian is not guaranteed due to the non-unitary nature of the evolution. Using Floquet theory, we construct a well-defined time-independent Floquet Lindbladian in an extended Sambe-Liouville space, transforming the initial time-dependent problem to a static and non-Hermitian eigenvalue problem. For harmonic driving, we introduce a matrix continued fraction method to nonperturbatively resum multiphoton processes and construct an effective Floquet Lindbladian acting only on the physical Liouville space. Compared to other high-frequency expansions, this method has the advantage of providing the whole infinite series expansion at once. Using a resolvent formalism, we show how to obtain a spectral Floquet representation of correlation functions of an open quantum system. As an application, we consider a dissipating two-level system in a linearly polarized field and calculate its resonance fluorescence spectrum. Furthermore, we consider a parametrically driven quantum dot with pump and loss for which we calculate its spectral function and current-voltage characteristics.