Exact solution of the Jaynes-Cummings model with cavity damping

Abstract

Operating in Laplace language and making use of a representation based on photon-number states, we find the exact solution for the density operator that belongs to the Jaynes-Cummings model with cavity damping. The detuning parameter is set equal to zero and the optical resonator does not contain any thermal photons. It is shown that the master equation for the density operator can be replaced by two algebraic recursion relations for vectors of dimension 2 and 4. These vectors are built up from suitably chosen matrix elements of the density operator. By performing an iterative procedure, the exact solution for each matrix element is found in the form of an infinite series. We demonstrate that all series are convergent and discuss how they can be truncated when carrying out numerical work. With the help of techniques from function theory, it is proved that our solutions respect the following conditions on the density operator: conservation of trace, Hermiticity, convergence to the initial state for small times, and convergence to the ground state for large times. We compute some matrix elements of the density operator for the case of weak damping and find that their analytic structure becomes much simpler. Finally, it is shown that the exact atomic density matrix converges to the state of maximum von Neumann entropy if the time, the square of the initial electromagnetic energy density, and the inverse of the cavity-damping parameter tend to infinity equally fast. The initial condition for the atom can be chosen freely, whereas the field may start from either a coherent or a photon-number state.