In the present work the Rabi Problem, involving the response of a spin 1/2 particle subjected to a magnetic field, is considered in a field theory approach. In this concrete physical scenario, we show that the second quantization procedure can be applied directly in a non-covariant theory. The proposed development explicits not only the relation between the full quantum treatment of the problem and the semiclassical Rabi model, but also the connection of these approaches with the Jaynes-Cummings model. The treatment is then extended to the matter component of the Rabi problem so that the Schr\{o}dinger equation is directly quantized. The generalized theory is consistent, strictly quantum and non-relativistic.
In the present work the Rabi Problem, involving the response of a spin 1/2 particle subjected to a magnetic field, is considered in a field theory approach. In this concrete physical scenario, we show that the second quantization procedure can be applied directly in a non-covariant theory. The proposed development explicits not only the relation between the full quantum treatment of the problem and the semiclassical Rabi model, but also the connection of these approaches with the Jaynes-Cummings model. The treatment is then extended to the matter component of the Rabi problem so that the Schr{o}dinger equation is directly quantized. The generalized theory is consistent, strictly quantum and non-relativistic.
Chapter 17 begins by approaching the general problem of a quantum system subject to a time-dependent perturbation. We then apply perturbation theory to the interaction of atomic matter with the radiation field and derive the most important radiative corrections. Atomic transitions – both induced and spontaneous – are discussed in detail, with some important applications. The formal introduction of field quantization allows us to make contact with quantum electrodynamics and quantum optics and discuss the Jaynes–Cummings model. Stochastic electrodynamics, in which the matter–field interaction is not a perturbation but is present ab initio, is used to explain atomic stability and its breakdown leading to radiative transitions. In the same spirit, the quantization of the field is physically justified by deriving the conventionally postulated field operators and their basic commutators. The chapter ends with a brief introduction to second quantization, an elegant and powerful formalism for describing and analyzing quantum many-body systems.
These lecture notes originate from a one-semester course on the mathematical foundations of second quantization, first given at the Department of Physics of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in the Winter Semester 2025/26 to a mixed audience of physics and mathematics students. Their guiding thread is a class of physical models: spin-boson models, describing a two-level system coupled to a boson field. After summarizing the necessary background on unbounded operators, up to the Kato-Rellich and KLMN theorems, and developing direct sums and tensor products of Hilbert spaces and of unbounded operators, we treat single-mode boson fields, constructing the ladder and number operators and characterizing their domains, before moving to Fock spaces, second quantization, bosonic and fermionic annihilation and creation operators, and the canonical (anti)commutation relations. Throughout, spin-boson models provide both the motivation and the test bench for the formalism: we rigorously establish their self-adjointness, solve the pure dephasing and Jaynes-Cummings models explicitly, deriving their spectra and the qubit channels they induce, show how their multimode counterparts display irreversible decoherence and decay, and, in an appendix, prove the rotating-wave approximation for the quantum Rabi model with an explicit error bound. Finally, we use the KLMN theorem to construct spin-boson models with non-normalizable form factors, and briefly discuss stronger ultraviolet divergences and the need for renormalization. Exercises with full solutions are included.
The quantum Rabi model is a model in quantum optics used to describe the interaction between a two-level atom and a single-level photon field.This model, described in 1963 by Jaynes and Cummings, is the fully quantized version of the original semi-classical model proposed in 1936 by Rabi.In previous years, the study of the properties of Hamiltonian of the quantum Rabi model and its energy levels (eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian) has been relegated mainly for two reasons.The first one was the belief that the quantum Rabi model was not an exactly solvable model, that is, that its energy levels could not be described analytically.The second reason is that in the parameter regime achievable at the time in experiments and applications, the quantum Rabi model could be approximated successfully by the Jaynes-Cummings model, a simpler model which is known to be exactly solvable.Both situations changed in recent years.In 2011, Daniel Braak proved the exact-solvability of the quantum Rabi model by constructing analytical solutions and defining a transcendental function, the G-function, whose zeros determine all the spectrum (with the exception of a (possible finite) set of exceptional eigenvalues).This pioneering technique has since then been successfully applied to show the exact-solvability of several models in quantum optics.On the other hand, due to the advances in experimental physics, starting from the first decade of this century, experiments have been steadily reaching parameter regimes where the Jaynes-Cummings model becomes unsuitable for approximation and in 2014, the experiments by Maissen et al reached regimes where it is imperative to consider the full Hamiltonian of the quantum Rabi model.Adding to this, recently there has also been proposals for applications of the quantum Rabi model in quantum information theory and quantum computing.For these reasons, there has been a large amount of research done in theoretical and experimental physics, and, more recently, mathematics on the subject of the quantum Rabi model, its generalizations and applications.In this thesis, we study the asymmetric quantum Rabi model, one of the generalizations of the quantum Rabi model.In this generalization, an additional non-trivial interaction term is introduced in the Hamiltonian, breaking the Z 2Z-symmetry of the quantum Rabi Hamiltonian.The presence of this symmetry in the quantum Rabi model explains the presence of crossings in the energy levels (degeneracies in the spectrum), so a priori there was no reason to expect degeneracies in the spectrum of the asymmetric version.In this work, we show that when the coefficient of the symmetry-breaking term is halfinteger, degeneracies appear in the spectrum of the asymmetric quantum Rabi model.This is done by studying the properties of the constraint polynomials, polynomials appearing in certain conditions that the parameters of the model must satisfy in order to have certain eigenvalues, called Juddian eigenvalues.The spectrum of the asymmetric quantum Rabi model is divided into different sets, an infinite set of regular eigenvalues, the zeros of the G-function and the exceptional eigenvalues, not captured as zeros of the G-function.The exceptional spectrum is further classified into Juddian and non-Juddian, according to the type of solution in the Segal-Bargmann space realization.These solutions are also described in terms of the sl 2 picture of the Hamiltonian in terms of irreducible representations of sl 2 .The case for Juddian and regular eigenvalues was already known, and in this thesis we complete the picture for the non-Juddian eigenvalues.Another main result of this work is to characterize the degeneracies of the asymmetric quantum Rabi model in terms of the types of eigenvalues and the parameters.Furthermore, by carefully studying the poles of the G-function, we define a new G-function whose zeros give the full spectrum of the asymmetric quantum Rabi model.Finally, we present a study on continued fractions expansions of integer powers of the Napier constant e with a nice representation and good convergence properties.This study is a byproduct of the study of certain orthogonal polynomial families related to the constraint polynomials of the AQRM.
Up to a point, the quantum theory developed in chapter 5 was quite general. However, the systems we had in mind were non-relativistic ones consisting of a fixed number of particles. In this chapter, we extend the theory to deal with systems in which the number of particles can change. There are several reasons for wanting to do this. The most obvious is that we need a method of describing high-energy scattering and decay processes in which particles can be created and destroyed. A second is that, when we try to make quantum theory consistent with special relativity, we encounter difficulties (discussed in chapter 7) that can be resolved only in this more general setting. The final reason is that, even for systems of non-relativistic particles, the mathematics rapidly becomes intractable as the number of particles increases. A useful device for dealing with large systems is, roughly speaking, to imagine adding an extra particle, which serves as a theoretical probe of the state of the system. To put the matter another way, the method of second quantization developed in this chapter provides a means of dealing with the entire system by considering only a few particles at a time.
We formulate and solve an effective spin-one quantum Rabi model motivated by the physical spin-one sector of the ten-component Duffin--Kemmer--Petiau (DKP) theory. After the constrained DKP components are separated from the three physical spin projections, the internal sector is represented as a qutrit. Under a single-mode and magnetic-dipole approximation, its coupling to a quantized electromagnetic field has the spin-one Rabi form g(a+a†)Sx. We derive the regular spectrum of this model in the Bargmann representation. The exact parity symmetry reduces the three-component problem to independent scalar three-term recurrences, from which parity-resolved spectral functions are obtained as continued fractions. The pole energies generated by eliminating the outer spin components are treated separately, allowing exceptional finite-polynomial states to be identified without confusing them with regular zeros of the continued fractions. Numerical comparison with direct Fock-space diagonalization confirms the regular spectral construction to better than 5×10−13 for a representative parameter set. The result establishes an exact spectral framework for a qutrit generalization of the quantum Rabi model and states explicitly the assumptions required for its connection with spin-one DKP dynamics.