Exciting with Quantum Light. I. Exciting an harmonic oscillator

TL;DR

This paper explores how quantum light excites a harmonic oscillator, introducing a Hilbert space mapping and analyzing excitation from various single-photon sources under different pumping regimes.

Contribution

It presents a novel Hilbert space mapping for analyzing quantum excitation of harmonic oscillators and examines excitation from different single-photon sources and regimes.

Findings

Hilbert space mapping for quantum excitation analysis

Excitation from single-photon sources under various regimes

Overview of future research directions

Abstract

We start a series of studies of the excitation of an optical target by quantum light. In this first part, we introduce the problematic and address the first case of interest, that of exciting the quantum harmonic oscillator, corresponding to, e.g., a single-mode passive cavity or a non-interacting bosonic field. We introduce a mapping of the Hilbert space that allows to chart usefully the accessible regions. We then consider the quantum excitation from single photon sources in the form of a two-level system under various regimes of (classical) pumping: incoherent, coherent and in the Mollow triplet regime. We close this first opus with an overview of the material to be covered in the subsequent papers.