Emission characteristics of laser-driven dissipative coupled-cavity systems

Abstract: We consider a laser-driven and dissipative system of two coupled cavities with Jaynes-Cummings nonlinearity. In particular, we investigate both incoherent and coherent laser driving, corresponding to different experimental situations. We employ Arnoldi time evolution as a numerical tool to solve exactly the many-body master equation describing the non-equilibrium quantum system. We evaluate the fluorescence spectrum and the spectrum of the second-order correlation function of the emitted light field. Finally, we relate the measured spectra of the dissipative quantum system to excitations of the corresponding non-dissipative quantum system. Our results demonstrate how to interpret spectra obtained from dissipative quantum systems and specify what information is contained therein.