We study the peculiarities of the nonstationary Casimir effect (creation of photons in cavities with moving boundaries) in the special case of two resonantly coupled modes with frequencies $ω_0$ and $(3Δ)ω_0$, parametrically excited due to small amplitude oscillations of the ideal cavity wall at the frequency $2ω_0(1δ)$ (with $|δ|,|Δ|\ll 1$). The effects of thermally induced oscillations in time dependences of the mean numbers of created photons and the exchange of quantum purities between the modes are discovered. Squeezing and photon distributions in each modes are calculated for initial vacuum and thermal states. A possibility of compensation of detunings is shown.
The geometrical phase is shown to be integral of motion. Deformation of particle distribution function corresponding to nonstationary Casimir effect is expressed in terms of multivariable Hermite polynomials. Correction to Planck distribution due to q--nonlinearity is discussed.
This is a review of publications on classical and quantum electrodynamics in cavities with moving boundaries (in the quantum case this subject is labeled frequently as "nonstationary Casimir effect" or "dynamical Casimir effect"), from 1921 to October of 2000, with an emphasis on analytical results related to cavities with resonantly oscillating boundaries.
We consider the nonstationary circuit QED setup in which a 3-level artificial atom in the $Δ$-configuration interacts with a single-mode cavity field of natural frequency $ω$. It is demonstrated that when some atomic energy level(s) undergoes a weak harmonic modulation, photons can be generated from vacuum via effective 1- and 3-photon transitions, while the atom remains approximately in the ground state. These phenomena occur in the dispersive regime when the modulation frequency is accurately tuned near $ω$ and $3ω$, respectively, and the generated field states exhibit strikingly different s…
We investigate analytically and numerically the nonstationary circuit QED setup in which $N$ independent qubits interact with a single mode of the Electromagnetic field confined in a resonator. We consider the harmonic time modulation of some parameter (atomic transition frequency or the atom-field coupling strength) and derive the unitary dynamics up to the second order in the modulation depth for $N=1$ and $N\gg 1$. It is shown that all the resonant phenomena that occur for modulation frequencies $\sim 2ω_{0}$ (where $ω_{0}$ is the cavity frequency) also occur for the halved frequencies. How…
The antidynamical Casimir effect (ADCE) is a term coined to designate the coherent annihilation of excitations due to resonant external perturbation of system parameters, allowing for extraction of quantum work from nonvacuum states of some field. Originally proposed for a two-level atom (qubit) coupled to a single cavity mode in the context of nonstationary quantum Rabi model, it suffered from very low transition rate and correspondingly narrow resonance linewidth. In this paper we show analytically and numerically that the ADCE rate can be increased by at least one order of magnitude by repl…
In this work we study the generation of photons inside an ideal cavity with resonantly oscillating boundaries in the presence of a two-level atom. We make use of Lie algebraic techniques to obtain an approximate time-evolution operator and evaluate not only the resonant and dispersive regimes but also explore different regions of parameters. We have found a very good agreement between our approximate results and those obtained by numerical means.
An effective toy model for an ideal one-dimensional nonstationary cavity is taken to be the starting point to derive a fitting markovian master equation for the corresponding leaky cavity. In the regime where the generation of photons via the dynamical Casimir effect is bounded, the master equation thus constructed allows us to investigate the effects of decoherence on the average number of Casimir photons and their quantum fluctuations through the second-order correlation function.
Thermal effects on the creation of particles under the influence of time-dependent boundary conditions are investigated. The dominant temperature correction to the energy radiated by a moving mirror is derived by means of response theory. For a resonantly vibrating cavity the thermal effect on the number of created photons is obtained non-perturbatively. Finite temperatures can enhance the pure vacuum effect by several orders of magnitude. The relevance of finite temperature effects for the experimental verification of the dynamical Casimir effect is addressed.
We study theoretically the nonstationary circuit QED system in which the artificial atom transition frequency, or the atom-cavity coupling, have a small periodic time modulation, prescribed externally. The system formed by the atom coupled to a single cavity mode is described by the Rabi Hamiltonian. We show that, in the dispersive regime, when the modulation periodicity is tuned to the `resonances', the system dynamics presents the dynamical Casimir effect, resonant Jaynes-Cummings or resonant Anti-Jaynes-Cummings behaviors, and it can be described by the corresponding effective Hamiltonians.…
We investigate the dynamical Casimir effect and its detection with Rydberg atoms. The photons are created in a resonant cavity with a plasma mirror of a semiconductor slab which is irradiated by periodic laser pulses. The canonical Hamiltonian is derived for the creation and annihilation operators showing the explicit time-variation in the couplings, which originates from the external configuration such as a nonstationary plasma mirror. The number of created photons is evaluated as squeezing from the Heisenberg equations with the Hamiltonian. Then, the detection of the photons as the atomic ex…
The phenomenon of particle creation within a resonantly vibrating lossy cavity is investigated for the example of a massless scalar field at finite temperature. Leakage is provided by insertion of a dispersive mirror into a larger ideal cavity. Via the rotating wave approximation we demonstrate that for the case of parametric resonance the exponential growth of the number of created particles and the strong enhancement at finite temperatures are preserved in the presence of reasonable losses. The relevance for experimental tests of quantum radiation via the dynamical Casimir effect is addresse…
We consider the nonstationary circuit QED architecture, where a single artificial two-level atom interacts with a cavity field mode under external modulation of one or more system parameters. Two different approaches are employed to study the effects of Markovian dissipation on modulation-induced transitions between the atom-field dressed states: the standard master equation of Quantum Optics and the recently formulated dressed-picture master equation. We estimate the associated transition rates and show that photon generation from vacuum ("dynamical Casimir effect", DCE) and coherent photon a…
We develop a microscopic toy model for Cavity dynamical Casimir effect (DCE), namely, the photon generation from vacuum due to a nonstationary dielectric slab in a fixed single mode cavity. We represent the slab by $N\gg 1$ noninteracting two-level atoms coupled to the field via the standard dipole interaction. We show that the DCE is contained implicitly in the light-matter interaction Hamiltonian when its parameters are externally prescribed functions of time. We also predict several new phenomena, such as saturation of the photon growth due to effective Kerr nonlinearity, generation of pair…
The phenomenon of particle creation within an almost resonantly vibrating cavity with losses is investigated for the example of a massless scalar field at finite temperature. A leaky cavity is designed via the insertion of a dispersive mirror into a larger ideal cavity (the reservoir). In the case of parametric resonance the rotating wave approximation allows for the construction of an effective Hamiltonian. The number of produced particles is then calculated using response theory as well as a non-perturbative approach. In addition we study the associated master equation and briefly discuss th…
Casimir-Polder interactions between an atom and a macroscopic body are typically regarded as due to the exchange of virtual photons. This is strictly true only at zero temperature. At finite temperature, real-photon exchange can provide a significant contribution to the overall dispersion interaction. Here we describe a new resonant two-photon process between an atom and a planar interface. We derive a second order effective Hamiltonian to explain how atoms can couple resonantly to the surface polariton modes of the dielectric medium. This leads to second-order energy exchanges which we compar…
We study the influence of fluctuations in periodic motion of boundaries of an ideal three-dimensional cavity on the rate of photon generation from vacuum due to the nonstationary Casimir effect.
We consider an analog of particle production in a quartic $O(N)$ quantum oscillator with time-dependent frequency, which is a toy model of particle production in the dynamical Casimir effect and de Sitter space. We calculate exact quantum averages, Keldysh propagator, and particle number using two different methods. First, we employ a kind of rotating wave approximation to estimate these quantities for small deviations from stationarity. Second, we extend these results to arbitrarily large deviations using the Schwinger-Keldysh diagrammatic technique. We show that in strongly nonstationary sit…
We consider a superconducting qubit coupled to the nonstationary transmission line cavity with modulated frequency taking into account energy dissipation. Previously, it was demonstrated that in the case of a single nonadiabatical modulation of a cavity frequency there are two channels of a two-level system excitation which are due to the absorption of Casimir photons and due to the counterrotating wave processes responsible for the dynamical Lamb effect. We show that the parametric periodical modulation of the resonator frequency can increase dramatically the excitation probability. Remarkabl…
To observe the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) induced by a moving mirror is a long-standing challenge because the mirror velocity needs to approach the speed of light. Here, we present an experimentally feasible method for observing this mechanical DCE in an optomechanical system. It employs a detuned, parametric driving to squeeze a cavity mode, so that the mechanical mode, with a typical resonance frequency, can parametrically and resonantly couple to the squeezed cavity mode, thus leading to a resonantly amplified DCE in the squeezed frame. The DCE process can be interpreted as {\it mechani…
The problem of photon creation from vacuum due to the nonstationary Casimir effect in an ideal one-dimensional Fabry--Perot cavity with vibrating walls is solved in the resonance case, when the frequency of vibrations is close to the frequency of some unperturbed electromagnetic mode: $ω_w=p(πc/L_0)(1+δ)$, $|δ|\ll 1$, (p=1,2,...). An explicit analytical expression for the total energy in all the modes shows an exponential growth if $|δ|$ is less than the dimensionless amplitude of vibrations $ε\ll 1$, the increment being proportional to $p\sqrt{ε^2-δ^2}$. The rate of photon generation from vac…
