Rare quantum metastable states in the strongly dispersive Jaynes-Cummings oscillator

We present evidence of metastable rare quantum-fluctuation switching for the driven dissipative Jaynes-Cummings oscillator coupled to a zero-temperature bath in the strongly dispersive regime. We show that single-atom complex amplitude bistability is accompanied by the appearance of a low-amplitude long-lived transient state, hereinafter called `dark state', having a distribution with quasi-Poissonian statistics both for the coupled qubit and cavity mode. We find that the dark state is linked to a spontaneous flipping of the qubit state, detuning the cavity to a low-photon response. The appearance of the dark state is correlated with the participation of the two metastable states in the dispersive bistability, as evidenced by the solution of the Master Equation and single quantum trajectories.Comment: Extensively revised text, 18 revised figures (16 in main and 2 in appendix), 38(+1) references, appendi

Mean-field and quantum-fluctuation dynamics in the driven dispersive Jaynes-Cummings model

In this work we investigate the regime of amplitude bistability in the driven dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (JC) model. We study the semiclassical equation dynamics in contrast to entangled cavity-photon and qubit quantum trajectories, discussing our results in the context of an out-of-equilibrium first order quantum dissipative phase transition for a single JC resonator. Finally, we compare the switching process between metastable states for the two system degrees of freedom by examining a single realization of the random qubit vector in the Bloch sphere next to the intracavity amplitude quasi distributions at given time instants