For deriving the JCM interaction Hamiltonian the quantized radiation field is taken to consist of a single bosonic mode with the field operator
,
where the operators and are the bosonic creation and annihilation operators and is the angular frequency of the mode. On the other hand, the two-level atom is equivalent to a spin-half whose state can be described using a three-dimensional Bloch vector. (It should be understood that "two-level atom" here is not an actual atom with spin, but rather a generic two-level quantum system whose Hilbert space is isomorphic to a spin-half.)
The atom is coupled to the field through its polarization operator .
The operators and are the raising and lowering operators of the atom. The operator is the atomic inversion operator, and is the atomic transition frequency.
This Hamiltonian contains both quickly and slowly
oscillating components. To get a solvable model, when
the quickly oscillating "counter-rotating" terms can be ignored. This is referred to as the rotating wave approximation.
Transforming back into the Schrödinger picture the JCM Hamiltonian is thus written as
It is possible, and often very helpful, to write the Hamiltonian of the full system as a sum of two commuting parts:
where
with called the detuning (frequency) between the field and the two-level system.
The eigenstates of , being of tensor product form, are easily solved and denoted by ,
where denotes the number of radiation quanta in the mode.
As the states
and
are degenerate with respect to
for all ,
it is enough to diagonalize
in the subspaces .
The matrix elements of in this subspace,
read
For a given , the energy eigenvalues of are
where is the Rabi frequency for the specific detuning parameter.
The eigenstates associated with the energy eigenvalues are given by
It is now possible to obtain the dynamics of a general state by expanding it on to the noted eigenstates. We consider a superposition of number states as the initial state for the field, , and assume an atom in the excited state is injected into the field. The initial state of the system is
Since the are stationary states of the field-atom system, then the state vector for times
is just given by
The Rabi oscillations can readily be seen in the sin and cos functions in the state vector. Different periods occur for different number states of photons.
What is observed in experiment is the sum of many periodic functions that can be very widely oscillating and destructively sum to zero at some moment of time, but will be non-zero again at later moments. Finiteness of this moment results just from discreteness of the periodicity arguments. If the field amplitude were continuous, the revival would have never happened at finite time.
It is possible in the Heisenberg notation to directly determine the unitary evolution operator from the Hamiltonian:[1]
where the operator is defined as
The unitarity of is guaranteed by the identities
and their Hermitian conjugates.
By the unitary evolution operator one can calculate the time evolution of the state of the system described by its density matrix, and from there the expectation value of any observable, given the initial state:
The initial state of the system is denoted by and is an operator denoting the observable.
The plot of quantum oscillations of atomic inversion (for quadratic scaled detuning parameter , where is the detuning parameter) was built on the basis of formulas obtained[2] by A.A. Karatsuba and E.A. Karatsuba.