Entanglement between living bacteria and quantized light witnessed by Rabi splitting

TL;DR

This paper models experiments where living bacteria interact with quantized light, demonstrating entanglement through vacuum Rabi splitting, and proposes using this splitting as an entanglement witness.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical model of bacteria-light interaction using the Dicke model and links Rabi splitting to entanglement detection.

Findings

Strong coupling between bacteria and light observed

Vacuum Rabi splitting correlates with entanglement

Model aligns with experimental observations

Abstract

We model recent experiments on living sulphur bacteria interacting with quantised light, using the Dicke model. The strong coupling achieved between the bacteria and the light indicates that during the experiment the bacteria (treated as dipoles) and the quantized light are entangled. The vacuum Rabi splitting, which was measured in the experiment for a range of different parameters, can be used as an entanglement witness.