Response of the Strongly-Driven Jaynes-Cummings Oscillator

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nonlinear dynamics and bistability of the Jaynes-Cummings oscillator in the strong-dispersive regime, providing a semiclassical analysis that aligns with experimental quantum trajectory simulations.

Contribution

It presents a non-perturbative semiclassical analysis revealing bistability in the Jaynes-Cummings model, distinct from Kerr nonlinearities, and explains experimental observations.

Findings

Identification of a bistable region in the Jaynes-Cummings oscillator

Qualitative agreement between quantum trajectory simulations and experiments

Distinct bistability mechanism from Kerr nonlinearities

Abstract

We analyze the Jaynes-Cummings model of quantum optics, in the strong-dispersive regime. In the bad cavity limit and on timescales short compared to the atomic coherence time, the dynamics are those of a nonlinear oscillator. A steady-state non-perturbative semiclassical analysis exhibits a finite region of bistability delimited by a pair of critical points, unlike the usual dispersive bistability from a Kerr nonlinearity. This analysis explains our quantum trajectory simulations that show qualitative agreement with recent experiments from the field of circuit quantum electrodynamics.