The possibility of the electron oscillations in a two-well potential is investigated in the article. The Hamiltonian of the system is calculated taking into account the formulas of the James-Cummings model. The unitary dynamics is carried out using a general solution of the Schrodinger equation. The conditions for the parameters of the problem under which the oscillation takes place are shown. These conditions for the exact formulation are discrete. However, it is valuable to find out at what parameters of the problem there occur approximate oscillations, at which an incomplete transition of a particle from one well to another is observed. In the standard manuals on the quantum theory of a single particle, the Hamiltonian was considered from the very beginning without photons, so it was assumed that complete oscillations always take place. This approximate consideration corresponds to reality only with a high potential between the wells. If the potential is low, the wells actually merge into one well, so that the spectrum and eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian become similar to the spectrum and eigenvalues of a one-dimensional potential – a radically different case. Such a discrepancy occurs due to ignoring the interaction of the electron with the electromagnetic field. If such an interaction is taken into account we get the dynamics described by the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. At a low potential, the energy gap between the ground and excited energy states of the electron grows. Since the probability of photon emission is proportional to this value, the interaction with the field cannot be ignored.
The possibility of the electron oscillations in a two-well potential is investigated in the article. The Hamiltonian of the system is calculated taking into account the formulas of the James-Cummings model. The unitary dynamics is carried out using a general solution of the Schrodinger equation. The conditions for the parameters of the problem under which the oscillation takes place are shown. These conditions for the exact formulation are discrete. However, it is valuable to find out at what parameters of the problem there occur approximate oscillations, at which an incomplete transition of a particle from one well to another is observed. In the standard manuals on the quantum theory of a single particle, the Hamiltonian was considered from the very beginning without photons, so it was assumed that complete oscillations always take place. This approximate consideration corresponds to reality only with a high potential between the wells. If the potential is low, the wells actually merge into one well, so that the spectrum and eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian become similar to the spectrum and eigenvalues of a one-dimensional potential – a radically different case. Such a discrepancy occurs due to ignoring the interaction of the electron with the electromagnetic field. If such an interaction is taken into account we get the dynamics described by the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. At a low potential, the energy gap between the ground and excited energy states of the electron grows. Since the probability of photon emission is proportional to this value, the interaction with the field cannot be ignored.
We theoretically investigate quantum Rabi oscillations in a system consisting of a two-level atom (qubit) strongly coupled to a one-dimensional open waveguide. In contrast to conventional cavity quantum electrodynamics, the qubit interacts with a continuum of propagating modes, which gives rise to fundamentally different dynamical behavior. Within the rotating-wave approximation, we express the multimode Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian in terms of collective bosonic operators and show that the system possesses two integrals of motion, enabling an exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian in the single-excitation subspace. We show that for a strongly interacting qubit-photon system, the dynamics are captured by a reduced two-level model. In this framework, each level is defined as the product of the atomic excited state and a specific field mode, which takes the form of a multiphoton Fock-like state. In this picture, the Rabi oscillations represent a collective phenomenon corresponding to oscillations between multiphoton states differing by a single photon. We then extend our analysis to multiphoton processes in which the initial field is a coherent state with a continuous spectrum. In this case, the Rabi frequency is shown to be sensitive to the spectral profile of the function that generates the coherent state.
We study the dynamics of a system consisting of a two-level atom and a quantum oscillator coupled by the vacuum radiation field. The oscillator and the atom are assumed to have the same resonance frequency. In contrast to the two-atom or two-oscillator case, the atom-oscillator system leads to an unclosed hierarchy of equations for the operators that determine the radiation pattern emitted by the atom-oscillator system. Instead of using the operator equations, we formulate the problem in terms of density-matrix equations which can be solved once the initial conditions are specified. As an example, we looked at the radiation pattern, the decay dynamics, and the spectrum for an initial condition in which the oscillator is in its n=1 state and the atom is in its excited state. Dressed states (dressed by the static interaction between the atom and oscillator) prove to be especially useful for interpreting the results and comparing them with the two-atom and two-oscillator systems. All calculations are carried out using the resonance or rotating-wave approximation. The relationship of our work to damped Jaynes-Cummings models is noted.
The scientific interest in the analytical solution of the quantum Rabi model is due to the widespread use of this simple model in quantum optics, quantum computing, cavity QED, and nanoelectromechanical systems. This interest is related to the need for the theoretical description of the interaction of a two-level system with a quantum oscillator in the case when the rotating wave approximation fails. In this Letter, we present an approach to the exact diagonalization of the quantum Rabi Hamiltonian. This approach is based on the properties of the Pauli operators and allows us to readily solve the stationary Schrodinger equation for a two-level system. First, we demonstrate the applicability of the approach to the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian to get the well-known solution. Then, we obtain the eigenvalues and eigenstates for the quantum Rabi Hamiltonian using the proposed approach. It is shown that the obtained eigenstates can be represented in the basis of the eigenstates of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian.
The eigenstates of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian (the dressed atomic states) are widely used to describe the interaction between a single two-level atom and a single mode of the electromagnetic field. They provide a particularly useful basis when the secular approximation is justified. For an atom interacting fog with n photons in a cavity, the secular approximation requires that the n-photon Rabi frequency 2 n g be much larger than the atomic and cavity linewidths. Normally this condition is met when n is large and the coupling constant g is much smaller than the atomic and cavity linewidths. In this paper we allow g to be larger than the linewidths, and we allow the photon number to be small. We show that when the cavity is driven by a coherent field, the usual secular approximation cannot be used. The natural basis states become are now the eigenstates of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian plus the external field interaction. We solve this eigenvalue problem by separating the field and atomic parts of the Hamiltonian using a displacement and squeeze in the Hilbert-space of the field. We find that the Rabi frequencies are renormalized downwards as the strength of the driving field is increased. They eventually vanish at a critical field strength. At this critical field strength we observe a spontaneous symmetry breaking in the steady-state solution of the master equation for a single atom interacting with a driven cavity mode.
We have in this thesis looked at two very different problems related to quantum optics. In Part I we have studied the Jaynes-Cummings model with cavity damping and a thermal background. To give an introduction to the field we started Chapter 2 by repeating how one in general derives the master equations for a system coupled to a reservoir. We then repeat the Jaynes-Cummings model and show extensions of the Jaynes-Cummings model where cavity-damping and a thermal background are taken into account. We proceed, in Chapter 3, by finding an analytical solution to the Jaynes-Cummings model with cavity damping in a thermal background when there is no detuning in the system, i.e. we have resonance between the energy of the photons in the cavity and the energy difference in the excited and ground state of the atom. We derive analytical expressions for P+(t), the probability of finding the atom in an excited state after some transition time t given that the atom was prepared in an excited state, and P++(t), the probability of finding the atom in an excited state after some transition time t when a previous atom was measured to be in the excited state. Both atoms where initially prepared in the excited state. We also, in Section 3.7 make use of the Poisson summation formula to rewrite the analytical solution P+(t) in terms of a Fourier series, from which we can predict the location of the revivals in the system. In Section 3.8 we derive stationary results, i.e. when the transition time t→∞, for the probabilities P+(t) and P++(t) and the mean number of photons ‹ n(t) › in the cavity. From our analytical results one is, for instance, led to believe that the probability P+(t) approaches 0 as the transitiontime increases, when it in reality approaches the value nb/(1 + 2nb). The results of our study of the extended Jaynes-Cummings model is presented in the article “Macroscopic Interference Effects in Resonant Cavities” and is published in Physica Scripta [5]. The article is reprinted as Article 1 at the end of this thesis. In Chapter 4 we present the result of a numerical solution of the Jaynes-Cummings model with cavity damping in a thermal background. Here we consider both the resonant case and also the case where detuning is present in the system. When we compare our numerical simulation with our analytical solutions we find that the correlation between the two are close to 1, at least when experimental values of Walther et al. [22] and Brune et al. [15, 16] are used. We also present some figures that show how the revival times and probabilities previously discussed is affected by detuning. In Section 4.2 we find an analytical formula for the revival time where detuning is embedded. In Chapter 4 we also, shortly, discuss how the detuning changes the effective number of photons in the cavity and what criteria should be present in order to separate the revival times.In Part II we study some aspects of quantum mechanical phase. We start, in Section 5.1, by repeating the definition and some results of the Susskind-Glogower phase operator. We then turn our attention to the Pegg-Barnett phase operator [26, 27, 28] in Section 5.4. We describe how to evaluate expectation-values and variances of the Pegg-Barnett phase. In Section 5.5 we establish an upper and lower bound on the phase based on the Pegg-Barnett phase description.In Section 5.9 we repeat some details of a new formalism of the phase which we have conveniently called the NFM-formalism after its inventors Noh, Foug`eres and Mandel [29, 30, 31]. We then describe how to find expectation-values using the Pegg-Barnett phase operator definition applied to the NFM-experiment described in Section 5.9. Our work on the quantum mechanical phase operator is presented in the paper “On the Quantum Phase Operator for Coherent States” and is published in Physica Scripta [6]. This paper is reprinted as Article II at the end of this thesis.
We study the relations between massless Dirac fermions in an electromagnetic field and atoms in quantum optics. After getting the solutions for the energy spectrum, we show that it is possible to reproduce the 2D Dirac Hamiltonian, with all its quantum relativistic effects, in a controllable system such as a single trapped ion, through the Jaynes–Cummings and anti-Jaynes–Cummings models. Also we show that under certain conditions, the evolution of the Dirac Hamiltonian provides us with Rashba spin–orbit and linear Dresselhaus couplings. Considering the multimode multiphoton Jaynes–Cummings model interacting with N modes of an electromagnetic field prepared in general pure quantum states, we analyze the Rabi oscillation. Evaluating the time evolution of the Dirac position operator, we determine the Zitterbewegung frequency and the corresponding oscillating term as a function of the electromagnetic field.