A qubit strongly coupled to a resonant cavity: asymmetry of the spontaneous emission spectrum beyond the rotating wave approximation

We investigate the spontaneous emission (SE) spectrum of a qubit in a lossy resonant cavity. We use neither the rotating-wave approximation nor the Markov approximation. For the weak-coupling case, the SE spectrum of the qubit is a single peak, with its location depending on the spectral density of the qubit environment. Then, the asymmetry (of the location and heights of the two peaks) of the two SE peaks (which are related to the vacuum Rabi splitting) changes as the qubit–cavity coupling increases. Explicitly, for a qubit in a low-frequency intrinsic bath, the height asymmetry of the splitting peaks is enhanced as the qubit–cavity coupling strength increases. However, for a qubit in an Ohmic bath, the height asymmetry of the spectral peaks is inverted compared to the low-frequency bath case. With further increasing the qubit–cavity coupling to the ultra-strong regime, the height asymmetry of the left and right peaks is slightly inverted, which is consistent with the corresponding case of a low-frequency bath. This inversion of the asymmetry arises from the competition between the Ohmic bath and the cavity bath. Therefore, after considering the 6 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. New Journal of Physics 13 (2011) 073002 1367-2630/11/073002+21$33.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft 2 anti-rotating terms, our results explicitly show how the height asymmetry in the SE spectrum peaks depends on the qubit–cavity coupling and the type of intrinsic noise experienced by the qubit.