Carlos Sánchez Muñoz

We present a proposal for a tunable source of single photons operating in the terahertz (THz) regime. This scheme transforms incident visible photons into quantum THz radiation by driving a single polar quantum emitter with an optical laser, with its permanent dipole enabling dressed THz transitions enhanced by the resonant coupling to a cavity. This mechanism offers optical tunability of properties such as the frequency of the emission or its quantum statistics (ranging from antibunching to entangled multiphoton states) by modifying the intensity and frequency of the drive. We show that the implementation of this proposal is feasible with state-of-the-art photonics technology. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Abstract We present an inference method utilizing artificial neural networks for parameter estimation of a quantum probe monitored through a single continuous measurement. Unlike existing approaches focusing on the diffusive signals generated by continuous weak measurements, our method harnesses quantum correlations in discrete photon-counting data characterized by quantum jumps. We benchmark the precision of this method against Bayesian inference, which is optimal in the sense of information retrieval. By using numerical experiments on a two-level quantum system, we demonstrate that our approach can achieve a similar optimal performance as Bayesian inference, while drastically reducing computational costs. Additionally, the method exhibits robustness against the presence of imperfections in both measurement and training data. This approach offers a promising and computationally efficient tool for quantum parameter estimation with photon-counting data, relevant for applications such as quantum sensing or quantum imaging, as well as robust calibration tasks in laboratory-based settings.

AbstractRecent technological developments have made it increasingly easy to access the non-perturbative regimes of cavity quantum electrodynamics known as ultrastrong or deep strong coupling, where the light–matter coupling becomes comparable to the bare modal frequencies. In this work, we address the adequacy of the broadly used single-mode cavity approximation to describe such regimes. We demonstrate that, in the non-perturbative light–matter coupling regimes, the single-mode models become unphysical, allowing for superluminal signalling. Moreover, considering the specific example of the quantum Rabi model, we show that the multi-mode description of the electromagnetic field, necessary to account for light propagation at finite speed, yields physical observables that differ radically from their single-mode counterparts already for moderate values of the coupling. Our multi-mode analysis also reveals phenomena of fundamental interest on the dynamics of the intracavity electric field, where a free photonic wavefront and a bound state of virtual photons are shown to coexist.