Capturing Vacuum Fluctuations and Photon Correlations in Cavity QED with Multi-Trajectory Ehrenfest Dynamics
Physical Review A 99, 063819 (2019)
Capturing Vacuum Fluctuations and Photon Correlations in Cavity QED with Multi-Trajectory Ehrenfest Dynamics
We describe vacuum fluctuations and photon-field correlations in interacting quantum mechanical light-matter systems, by generalizing the application of mixed quantum-classical dynamics techniques. We employ the multi-trajectory implementation of Ehrenfest mean field theory, traditionally developed for electron-nuclear problems, to simulate the spontaneous emission of radiation in a model QED cavity-bound atomic system. We investigate the performance of this approach in capturing the dynamics of spontaneous emission from the perspective of both the atomic system and the cavity photon field, through a detailed comparison with exact benchmark quantum mechanical observables and correlation functions. By properly accounting for the quantum statistics of the vacuum field, while using mixed quantum-classical (mean field) trajectories to describe the evolution, we identify a surprisingly accurate and promising route towards describing quantum effects in realistic correlated light-matter systems.
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- http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.063819
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- http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01889
- Notes
- We would like to thank Niko Sakkinen and Johannes Flick for insightful discussions and acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council (ERC-2015-AdG-694097). AK acknowledges support from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.
Related Projects
- Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ), The Flatiron Institute, New York
- ERC (Advanced-grant): "Quantum Spectroscopy: exploring new states of matter out of equilibrium (QSpec-NewMat)"
- MPSD-Max-Planck Hamburg