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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Signatures of non-Markovianity in cavity QED with color centers in two-dimensional materials

Mark Kamper Svendsen1, Sajid Ali1,2, Nicolas Stenger3,4,5, Kristian Sommer Thygesen1,4, and Jake Iles-Smith6,7,*

  • 1CAMD, Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
  • 2School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia
  • 3Department of electrical and photonics engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
  • 4Center for Nanostructured Graphene, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
  • 5NanoPhoton–Center for Nanophotonics, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
  • 6Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
  • 7Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

  • *jake.iles-smith@manchester.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L032037 – Published 15 September, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.L032037

Abstract

Light-matter interactions of defects in two-dimensional materials are expected to be profoundly impacted by strong coupling to phonons. In this work, we combine ab initio calculations of a defect in hBN with a fully quantum mechanical and numerically exact description of a cavity-defect system to elucidate this impact. We show that, even at weak light-matter coupling, the dynamical evolution of the cavity-defect system has clear signatures of non-Markovian phonon effects, and that linear absorption spectra show the emergence of hybridized light-matter-phonon states in regimes of strong light-matter coupling. We emphasise that our methodology is general, and can be applied to a wide variety of material-defect systems.

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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L032037– Published 15 September, 2023
  • Received 2 August 2022
  • Revised 30 March 2023
  • Accepted 15 May 2023
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