Radiation trapping effect versus superradiance in quantum simulation of light-matter interaction

TL;DR

This paper explores the coexistence of superradiance and radiation trapping in quantum simulations of light-matter interactions, highlighting how initial state symmetry influences these effects and their potential for probing quantum phenomena.

Contribution

It demonstrates the simultaneous presence of superradiance and radiation trapping in a single system and links initial state symmetry to the resulting dynamical behavior in quantum simulators.

Findings

Superradiance and radiation trapping can coexist in a single cavity-qubit system.

Initial state symmetry determines whether superradiance or trapping dominates.

The effects depend on the entanglement and indistinguishability of emitters.

Abstract

We propose a realization of two remarkable effects of Dicke physics in quantum simulation of light-matter many-body interactions with artificial quantum systems. These effects are a superradiant decay of an ensemble of qubits and the opposite radiation trapping effect. We show that both phenomena coexist in the crossover regime of a "moderately bad" single-mode cavity coupled to the qubit subsystem. Depending on the type of the initial state and on the presence of multipartite entanglement in it, the dynamical features can be opposite resulting either in the superradiance or in the radiation trapping despite of the fact that the initial state contains the same number of excited qubits. The difference originates from the symmetrical or nonsymmetrical character of the initial wave function of the ensemble, which corresponds to indistinguishable or distinguishable emitters. We argue that a coexistence of both effects can be used in dynamical quantum simulators to demonstrate realization of Dicke physics, effects of multipartite quantum entanglement, as well as quantum interference and thus to deeply probe quantum nature of these artificial quantum systems.