Capturing vacuum fluctuations and photon correlations in cavity quantum electrodynamics with multitrajectory Ehrenfest dynamics

Norah M. Hoffmann, Christian Schäfer, Angel Rubio, Aaron Kelly, and Heiko Appel
Phys. Rev. A 99, 063819 – Published 17 June 2019

Abstract

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 multitrajectory implementation of Ehrenfest mean-field theory, traditionally developed for electron-nuclear problems, to simulate the spontaneous emission of radiation in a model quantum electrodynamical 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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  • Received 29 January 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.063819

©2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Norah M. Hoffmann1, Christian Schäfer1, Angel Rubio1,2, Aaron Kelly1,3,*, and Heiko Appel1,†

  • 1Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter and Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, 22761 Hamburg, Germany
  • 2Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ), Flatiron Institute, 162 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010, USA
  • 3Department of Chemistry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada B3H 4R2

  • *aaron.kelly@dal.ca
  • heiko.appel@mpsd.mpg.de

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Issue

Vol. 99, Iss. 6 — June 2019

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