Dynamical Casimir effect via modulated Kerr or higher-order nonlinearities

Abstract

We show two examples in which the dynamical Casimir effect can be achieved by modulating the Kerr or higher-order nonlinearities. In the first case the cavity field is coupled to an arbitrary number of qubits or a harmonic oscillator via the dipole interaction. In the second case, the modulation of the nonlinearities is accompanied by the off-resonance modulation of the cavity frequency. We present the analytic description of the phenomenon and supplement it with numeric simulations, demonstrating that photons can be created from vacuum and the resulting hyper-Poissonian photon statistics is very different from the squeezed vacuum state.