Signatures of Non-Markovianity in Cavity-QED with Color Centers in 2D Materials

TL;DR

This paper investigates how phonon interactions influence light-matter coupling in 2D material defects, revealing non-Markovian effects and hybrid states through a combined ab initio and quantum modeling approach.

Contribution

It introduces a general, fully quantum mechanical method to analyze non-Markovian phonon effects in cavity-defect systems in 2D materials.

Findings

Signatures of non-Markovian phonon effects at weak coupling

Emergence of hybrid light-matter-phonon states at strong coupling

Method applicable to various material/defect systems

Abstract

Light-matter interactions of defects in two dimensional materials are expected to be profoundly impacted by strong coupling to phonons. In this work, we combine ab initio calculations of a defect in hBN, with a fully quantum mechanical and numerically exact description of a cavity-defect system to elucidate this impact. We show that even at weak light-matter coupling, the dynamical evolution of the cavity-defect system has clear signatures of non-markovian phonon effects, and that linear absorption spectra show the emergence of hybridised light-matter-phonon states in regimes of strong light-matter coupling. We emphasise that our methodology is general, and can be applied to a wide variety of material/defect systems.