Microscopic toy model for Cavity dynamical Casimir effect

TL;DR

This paper introduces a microscopic toy model for the dynamical Casimir effect in a cavity with a nonstationary dielectric slab, predicting new phenomena like saturation, inverse DCE, and anti-DCE, with extensions to circuit QED.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel microscopic model for DCE that reveals new effects and extends to circuit QED architectures for entangled state generation.

Findings

Photon saturation due to Kerr nonlinearity

Generation of atomic excitation pairs (Inverse DCE)

Coherent annihilation of excitations (Anti-DCE)

Abstract

We develop a microscopic toy model for Cavity dynamical Casimir effect (DCE), namely, the photon generation from vacuum due to a nonstationary dielectric slab in a fixed single mode cavity. We represent the slab by $N\gg 1$ noninteracting two-level atoms coupled to the field via the standard dipole interaction. We show that the DCE is contained implicitly in the light-matter interaction Hamiltonian when its parameters are externally prescribed functions of time. We also predict several new phenomena, such as saturation of the photon growth due to effective Kerr nonlinearity, generation of pairs of atomic excitations instead of photons ("Inverse DCE") and coherent annihilation of pair of system excitations due to the atomic modulation ("Anti-DCE"). These results are extended to the circuit QED architecture, where similar effects can be implemented with a single qubit providing an alternative way to generate cavity and atom-field entangled states.