Atomic spatial coherence with spontaneous emission in a strong coupling cavity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spontaneous emission affects atomic spatial coherence in a strongly coupled cavity, revealing that spontaneous emission destroys inter-site coherence while cavity decay has minimal impact, with coherence depending on pump amplitude.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of spontaneous emission effects on atomic coherence in cavity QED using quantum Monte-Carlo simulations, highlighting the differential impacts of spontaneous emission and cavity decay.

Findings

Spontaneous emission destroys inter-site atomic coherence.

Cavity decay does not significantly affect atomic coherence.

Atomic coherence depends strongly on cavity pump amplitude.

Abstract

The role of spontaneous emission in the interaction between a two-level atom and a pumped micro-cavity in the strong coupling regime is discussed in this paper. Especially, using a quantum Monte-Carlo simulation, we investigate atomic spatial coherence. It is found that atomic spontaneous emission destroys the coherence between neighboring lattice sites, while the cavity decay does not. Furthermore, our computation of the spatial coherence function shows that the in-site locality is little affected by the cavity decay, but greatly depends on the cavity pump amplitude.