A system of cascaded qubits interacting via the oneway exchange of photons is
studied. While for general operating conditions the system evolves to a
superposition of Bell states (a dark state) in the long-time limit, under a
particular resonance condition no steady state is reached within a finite time.
We analyze the conditional quantum evolution (quantum trajectories) to
characterize the asymptotic behavior under this resonance condition. A distinct
bimodality is observed: for perfect qubit coupling, the system either evolves
to a maximally entangled Bell state without emitting photons (the dark state),
or executes a sustained entangled-state cycle - random switching between a pair
of Bell states while emitting a continuous photon stream; for imperfect
coupling, two entangled-state cycles coexist, between which a random selection
is made from one quantum trajectory to another.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure