Benchmarking Semiclassical and Perturbative Methods for Real-time Simulations of Cavity-Bound Emission and Interference

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks semiclassical and perturbative methods for simulating strong light-matter interactions in quantum cavities, highlighting their accuracy and limitations in capturing correlated dynamics and interference effects.

Contribution

It systematically compares multiple approximate and perturbative techniques for modeling cavity-bound atomic systems with strong coupling and interference.

Findings

Most methods accurately model correlated light-matter dynamics.

Fewest switches surface hopping performs less well in interference scenarios.

Many semiclassical methods struggle to fully capture interference effects.

Abstract

We benchmark a selection of semiclassical and perturbative dynamics techniques by investigating the correlated evolution of a cavity-bound atomic system to assess their applicability to study problems involving strong light-matter interactions in quantum cavities. The model system of interest features spontaneous emission, interference, and strong coupling behaviour, and necessitates the consideration of vacuum fluctuations and correlated light-matter dynamics. We compare a selection of approximate dynamics approaches including fewest switches surface hopping, multi-trajectory Ehrenfest dynamics, linearized semiclasical dynamics, and partially linearized semiclassical dynamics. Furthermore, investigating self-consistent perturbative methods, we apply the Bogoliubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon hierarchy in the second Born approximation. With the exception of fewest switches surface hopping, all methods provide a reasonable level of accuracy for the correlated light-matter dynamics, with most methods lacking the capacity to fully capture interference effects.