05/12/2023 - 17:00 Aula 1B1, Pal.B-RM002
The semiclassical Rabi model of light-matter interaction goes back to Rabi's description and development of nuclear magnetic resonance technology in the 1940's, and Rabi provided a formal proof of his so-called rotating wave approximation, that enabled explicit and crucial computations. A few years later, Jaynes and Cummings came up with a quantum mechanical analogue, leading to the Jaynes-Cummings model, which has become one of the main tools of modern quantum optics with ramifications in quantum computing. Despite a number of qualitative and formal arguments as to why the rotating wave approximation in the latter case should be correct, a rigorous proof was missing for more than 50 years. The goal of this talk is to provide some generally accessible background information about the underlying models and the approximation and then a sketch of the proof along with some experimentally interesting error bounds. (Based on joint work with D. Burgarth, P. Facchi, M. Ligabò)