Two-Level Couplings

Akira Okada

The effect of a driving field on the dynamics of a two-level system coupled to a bath is studied. Allowance is made for arbitrary coupling between the two levels, arbitrary coupling of the two levels to the bath, and an arbitrary bath. For a given two-level system, the coupling between the two levels can be made to vanish by applying a high-frequency driving field whose period is much shorter than any characteristic time scale of the driven system, under the condition that the coupling of the driven system to the field is independent of the bath coordinates.

Brian P. Anderson

Ulrich Hohenester

Changqing Wang, Yulong Liu, Re-Bing Wu +1 more

Nonclassical light fields can be generated from two coupled cavities that are interacted with a two-level system. This scheme is drawing extensive attention because the mode coupling can reduce the requirement of coupling constants between the light fields and the two-level system. However, the effect of phase differences between different coupling constants on photon antibunching is always neglected. Considering a two-level system interacting with two coupled cavities, we analyze the statistical properties of the cavity field and show that the photon antibunching can be affected by the phase differences of coupling constants between the two-level system and the cavity modes, or between the cavity modes and the driving fields, and thus we can engineer the phases to optimally modulate single-photon sources or nonclassical light fields.

Titus Sandu

The time-dependent behavior of a two-level system interacting with a quantum oscillator system is analyzed in the case of a coupling larger than both the energy separation between the two levels and the energy of the quantum oscillator ($\ensuremath{\Omega}<\ensuremath{\omega}<\ensuremath{\lambda}$, where $\ensuremath{\Omega}$ is the frequency of the transition between the two levels, $\ensuremath{\omega}$ is the frequency of the oscillator, and $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ is the coupling between the two-level system and the oscillator). Our calculations show that the amplitude of the expectation value of the oscillator coordinate decreases as the two-level system undergoes the transition from one level to the other, while the transfer probability between the levels is staircaselike. This behavior is explained by the interplay between the adiabatic and nonadiabatic regimes encountered during the dynamics with the system acting as a quantum counterpart of the Landau-Zener model. The transition between the two levels occurs as long as the expectation value of the oscillator coordinate is driven close to zero. On the contrary, if the initial conditions are set such that the expectation values of the oscillator coordinate are far from zero, the system will remain locked on one level.