Speeding up antidynamical Casimir effect with nonstationary qutrits

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that replacing a qubit with a nonstationary qutrit significantly enhances the antidynamical Casimir effect rate, enabling faster excitation annihilation and more efficient quantum work extraction.

Contribution

The study analytically and numerically shows that using a nonstationary qutrit instead of a qubit increases the ADCE rate by over tenfold and alters the dynamics of photon and atomic excitations.

Findings

ADCE rate increased by at least an order of magnitude with a qutrit

Photon and atomic excitation dynamics differ from the qubit case

Total excitation number dynamics are faster but qualitatively similar

Abstract

The antidynamical Casimir effect (ADCE) is a term coined to designate the coherent annihilation of excitations due to resonant external perturbation of system parameters, allowing for extraction of quantum work from nonvacuum states of some field. Originally proposed for a two-level atom (qubit) coupled to a single cavity mode in the context of nonstationary quantum Rabi model, it suffered from very low transition rate and correspondingly narrow resonance linewidth. In this paper we show analytically and numerically that the ADCE rate can be increased by at least one order of magnitude by replacing the qubit by an artificial three-level atom (qutrit) in a properly chosen configuration. For the cavity thermal state we demonstrate that the dynamics of the average photon number and atomic excitation is completely different from the qubit's case, while the behavior of the total number of excitations is qualitatively similar yet significantly faster.