Coherent destruction of tunneling and dark Floquet state

We study a system of three coherently coupled states, where one state is shifted periodically against the other two. We discover that this system possesses a dark Floquet state that has zero quasi-energy and negligible population at the intermediate state. This dark Floquet state manifests itself dynamically in terms of the suppression of inter-state tunneling, a phenomenon known as coherent destruction of tunneling (CDT). Owing to its different origin from the CDT found in a two-state-driven system, we call it dark CDT. At a high-frequency limit for the periodic driving, this Floquet state reduces to the well-known dark state. Our results can be generalized to systems with more states and be verified with easily implemented experiments within the current technologies. 6 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. New Journal of Physics 16 (2014) 013007 1367-2630/14/013007+11$33.00 © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft New J. Phys. 16 (2014) 013007 X Luo et al