# Cavity QED Beyond Rotating Wave Approximation: Photon Bunching from the Emission of Individual Qubits

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime, single quantum emitters can produce photon bunching instead of antibunching, challenging traditional quantum optics understanding.

## Contribution

It reveals that photon emission behavior fundamentally changes in the ultrastrong coupling regime, showing photon bunching from single emitters, unlike the antibunching seen in weaker coupling.

## Key findings

- Single emitters can emit bunched light in ultrastrong coupling.
- Photon antibunching breaks down beyond rotating wave approximation.
- Ultrastrong coupling alters the quantum nature of emitters.

## Abstract

Photon antibunching in the light scattered by single quantum emitters is one of the hallmarks of quantum optics, providing an unequivocal demonstration of the quantized nature of the electromagnetic field. Antibunching can be intuitively understood by the need for a two-level system lying in its lower state after emitting a photon to be re-excited into the upper one before a second emission can take place. Here we show that such a picture breaks down in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime, when the coupling strength becomes comparable to the bare emitter frequency. Specialising to the cases of both a natural and a superconducting artificial atom, we thus show that a single emitter coupled to a photonic resonator can emit bunched light. The result presented herein is a clear evidence of how the ultrastrong coupling regime is able to change the nature of individual atoms.