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Physical Review A

Establishment of correlated pure states through decay in a squeezed reservoir

ARTUR K. EKERT, G. Massimo Palma, Stephen Mark Barnett, P. L. Knight

Published Jun 1, 1989• 33 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Our normal understanding of the dissipative relaxation of a quantum system interacting with a reservoir or heat bath leads us to expect that the final state of the quantum system is a mixed state characteristic of one subsystem in equilibrium with the larger reservoir. We show that the broadband squeezed vacuum has such strong correlations in its quantum noise that, although it represents a true reservoir, the decay of subsystems, such as pairs of atoms or oscillators interacting with a squeezed reservoir, relaxes to a pure state that reflects these strong correlations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.39.6026

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Our normal understanding of the dissipative relaxation of a quantum system interacting with a reservoir or heat bath leads us to expect that the final state of the quantum system is a mixed state characteristic of one subsystem in equilibrium with the larger reservoir. We show that the broadband squeezed vacuum has such strong correlations in its quantum noise that, although it represents a true reservoir, the decay of subsystems, such as pairs of atoms or oscillators interacting with a squeezed reservoir, relaxes to a pure state that reflects these strong correlations.
We show that atoms interacting with a squeezed radiation field reservoir can exhibit phase-dependent population decay and relax into a highly correlated pure state, in striking difference to decay in a heat bath. We use a Heisenberg operator treatment of radiative transitions in a broadband squeezed light field described as a quantum white-noise field with correlated fluctuations to describe the modified decay of a single atom, and of two atoms cooperatively decaying in a squeezed vacuum. We compare this decay with that generated by a broadband thermal field which lacks the essential field-mode correlations characteristic of squeezing.
A pure quantum state of large number N of oscillators, interacting via harmonic coupling, evolves such that any small subsystem n<<N of the global state approaches equilibrium. This provides a different example where stability emerges as natural phenomena under quantum dynamics alone, with no necessity to bring in any additional statistical postulates. Mixing of equilibrated subsystems consisting of 1,2,...,n<<N clearly indicates that small subsystems are entangled with the rest of the state, i.e., the bath. Every single mode oscillator is found to relax in a mixed density matrix of the Boltzmann canonical form. In two oscillator stationary subsystems, intraentanglement within the "system" oscillators is found to exist when the magnitude of the squeezing parameter of the bath is comparable in magnitude with that of the coupling strength.
Time evolution of a two-atom system damped by a broad-band squeezed vacuum is examined. We show that in the squeezed vacuum the collective atomic levels are no longer eigenstates of the system. Diagonalizing the density matrix of the system, we find new ‘dressed’ eigenstates of the system and show that the evolution of the population of the dressed states is characterized by three different relaxation times, two of them strongly modified by the squeezed correlations. We find that the effect of the squeezed vacuum on the system appears on a time-scale larger than the shortest relaxation time of the system, and the relaxation time of the system to the pure two-atom squeezed state is strongly dependent on the intensity N of the squeezed vacuum and increases with increasing N.
We show that the master equation describing the dissipative evolution of a bosonic quantum system coupled to a phase-sensitive reservoir may be reduced to a standard form of dissipation for a thermal reservoir by canonical transformations. The solution to the master equation for complex phase-sensitive interaction induced, for example, by broadband squeezed light, may then be obtained by a transformation from the known solutions for the simpler thermal case. We show that canonical transformations have a particularly useful form when describing the evolution of quantum dissipative systems in phase space using the Wigner function. We illustrate these ideas with two phase-sensitive dissipative problems: that of the correlated-emission laser and of decay induced by a broadband squeezed vacuum field.
The interaction of an atomic two-level system and a squeezed vacuum leads to interesting effects in atomic dynamics, including line narrowing in resonance fluorescence and absorption spectra, and a suppressed (enhanced) decay of the in-phase and out-of-phase components of the atomic polarization. On the experimental side these predictions have so far eluded observation, essentially due to the difficulty of embedding atoms in a $4\ensuremath{\pi}$ squeezed vacuum. In this paper we show how to ``engineer'' a squeezed-bath-type interaction for an effective two-level system. In the simplest example, our two-level atom is represented by the two ground levels of an atom with an angular momentum $J=1/\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{2}J=1/2$ transition (a four-level system), which is driven by (weak) laser fields and coupled to the vacuum reservoir of radiation modes. Interference between the spontaneous emission channels in optical pumping leads to a squeezed-bath-type coupling and thus to symmetry breaking of decay on the Bloch sphere. With this system it should be possible to observe the effects predicted in the context of squeezed-bath--atom interactions. The laser parameters allow one to choose properties of the squeezed-bath interaction, such as the (effective) photon-number expectation number NNN and the squeezing phase $\ensuremath{\varphi}$. We present results of a detailed analytical and numerical study.