Interplay between quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects in a nondegenerate hyper-Raman nonlinear optical coupler

Abstract

Quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects are studied in an asymmetric nonlinear optical coupler composed of a probe waveguide and a system waveguide. The system is a nonlinear waveguide operating under non-degenerate hyper-Raman process, while both the pump modes in the system are constantly interacting with the probe waveguide. The effect of the presence of probe on the temporal evolution of the system in terms of the number of photons in Stokes and anti-Stokes modes as well as phonon number is quantified as Zeno parameter. The negative (positive) values of the Zeno parameter in the specific mode are considered as the signatures of the quantum Zeno (anti-Zeno)effect in that mode of the system. It is observed that the phase mismatch in Stokes and anti-Stokes generation processes can be controlled to induce a transition between quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects for both off-resonant and resonant hyper-Raman process. However, in case of off-resonant hyper-Raman process in the system waveguide, the frequency detuning parameters can also be used analogously to cause the desired crossover. Further, the general nature of the physical system and the perturbative technique used here allowed us to analytically study the possibilities of observing quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects in a large number of special cases, including situations where the process is spontaneous, partially spontaneous and/or the system is operated under degenerate hyper-Raman process, or a simple Raman process.