Strong-coupling limit of the driven dissipative light-matter interaction

Abstract: We approach the strong-coupling thermodynamic limit in the response of the open driven Jaynes-Cummings (JC) oscillator. We do so by highlighting the role of quantum fluctuations against the semiclassical response in three distinct regimes of operation. We begin by demonstrating the persistence of photon blockade, predicted in [H. J. Carmichael, Phys. Rev. X 5, 031028 (2015)], as a manifestation of the inherently-quantum and nonlinear JC spectrum revealed for vanishing dissipation. We then proceed to discuss the importance of bistability, which, despite being present in photon blockade, is able to provide an alignment between the semiclassical nonlinearity and quantum dynamics only for a driving amplitude having the same order of magnitude as the light-matter coupling strength. This resolution brings us to the critical point of the well-known quantum phase transition of second order on resonance, where the quantum and semiclassical pictures are once more contrasted for a varying participation of the two coherent interactions when going through the collapse of the quasi-energy spectrum.