Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 227, 2183–2188 (2019)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2018-800076-1

Regular Article

Photon pair production by STIRAP in ultrastrongly coupled matter-radiation systems

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Ettore Majorana”, Università di Catania, Via Santa Sofia 64, Catania (I), Italy
² RIKEN, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
³ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Via Santa Sofia 64, Catania (I), Italy
⁴ CNR-IMM Catania Universitá (MATIS), Via Santa Sofia 64, Catania (I), Italy

^a e-mail: gfalci@dmfci.unict.it

Received: 27 April 2018
Received in final form: 4 July 2018
Published online: 5 March 2019

Abstract

Artificial atoms (AAs) offer the possibility to design physical systems implementing new regimes of ultrastrong coupling (USC) between radiation and matter [C. Ciuti et al., Phys. Rev. B 72, 115303 (2005)], where previously unexplored non-perturbative physics emerges. While experiments so far provided only spectroscopic evidence of USC, we propose the dynamical detection of virtual photon pairs in the dressed eigenstates, which is a smoking gun of the very existence of USC in nature. We show how to coherently amplify this channel to reach 100% efficiency by operating advanced control similar to stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) [N.V. Vitanov et al., Rev. Mod. Phys. 89, 015006 (2017)].