A characteristic function approach to the Jaynes-Cummings model revivals

Abstract

A two-level atom interacting with an electromagnetic mode in a cavity experiences population collapses and revivals. They are an indirect signature of the field quantization, and also hold information about the mode. Thus, they may be harnessed for quantum-state reconstruction. In this work, we study the revival structures with the characteristic function approach. The characteristic function is essentially a spectral decomposition of the photon-number probability distribution. Exploiting the characteristic function periodicity, we find that the atomic population inversion can be understood as the result of interference between a set of structures akin to a free quantum-mechanical wave packet, each structure corresponding to snapshots of this packet for different degrees of dispersion. When these structures do not overlap, each of which can be identified to one of the inversion revivals, in which case we may also retrieve the photon-number distribution.

11 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Charge insensitive qubit design derived from the Cooper pair box
• Resolving photon number states in a superconducting circuit
• Reconstruction of non-classical cavity field states with snapshots of their decoherence
• Climbing the Jaynes-Cummings Ladder and Observing its Sqrt(n) Nonlinearity in a Cavity QED System
• Progressive field-state collapse and quantum non-demolition photon counting