Effects of counter-rotating couplings of the Rabi model with frequency modulation

Abstract

We theoretically study the dynamics and resonance shift of the Rabi model with frequency modulation, i.e., the Rabi model driven additionally by a slow longitudinal field, by using the counterrotating-hybridized rotating-wave (CHRW) method, aiming to illustrate the effects of the counterrotating (CR) terms of the transverse field. The CHRW method is based on a unitary transformation and reduces the aperiodic Hamiltonian to an effective periodic Hamiltonian that can be efficiently treated by Floquet theory. The validity of the effective Hamiltonian and widely used rotating-wave approximation (RWA) Hamiltonian is carefully examined compared to the numerically exact results over a wide parameter range. It is found that the effective Hamiltonian gives a correct description, while the RWA breaks down in the strong driving regime. Interestingly, we show that under certain conditions the longitudinal field can be used to modify resonance widths such that resonance widths can be comparable to the magnitude of the Bloch-Siegert (BS) shift, which in turn makes the CR-induced BS shift significant and leads to the complete breakdown of the RWA even in a moderately strong driving regime (in which the RWA holds for the Rabi model without frequency modulation). In addition, by using the effective Hamiltonian, we can efficiently access resonance positions for the bichromatically driven qubit and study how the resonance shifts due to the combined effects of the CR terms and frequency modulation. For a weak longitudinal field, we show that resonance positions can be analytically calculated from the effective Rabi frequency for the effective Hamiltonian, which are in excellent agreement with the numerically exact results.