Collapse and revivals of a the photon field in a many-body Landau-Zener process

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamic behavior of a photon field coupled to a two-level system during a Landau-Zener process, revealing collapse and revival phenomena that are observable with current cavity QED technology.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of collapse and revival phenomena in a photon field during a Landau-Zener transition, including effects of decay and experimental feasibility.

Findings

Photon field amplitude exhibits collapse and revival after resonance.

Decay effects influence the visibility of collapse and revival.

Phenomena are within reach of current cavity QED experiments.

Abstract

We consider the evolution of a two-level system coupled to a photon field initially in a coherent state, as the energy of the two-level system is linearly varied through resonance with the photon field. At a fixed time after the resonance, the amplitude of the photon field is found to show a collapse and subsequent revivals as a function of rate of energy variation. Including decay of the photon field, we find that the observation of such collapse and revivals is near the technological limit of current cavity QED experiments but should be achievable.