Ground state of the asymmetric Rabi model in the ultrastrong coupling regime

Abstract: We study the ground states of the single- and two-qubit asymmetric Rabi models, in which the qubit-oscillator coupling strengths for the counterrotating-wave and corotating-wave interactions are unequal. We take the transformation method to obtain the approximately analytical ground states for both models and numerically verify its validity for a wide range of parameters under the near-resonance condition. We find that the ground-state energy in either the single- or two-qubit asymmetric Rabi model has an approximately quadratic dependence on the coupling strengths stemming from different contributions of the counterrotating-wave and corotating-wave interactions. For both models, we show that the ground-state energy is mainly contributed by the counterrotating-wave interaction. Interestingly, for the two-qubit asymmetric Rabi model, we find that, with the increase of the coupling strength in the counterrotating-wave or corotating-wave interaction, the two-qubit entanglement first reaches its maximum then drops to zero. Furthermore, the maximum of the two-qubit entanglement in the two-qubit asymmetric Rabi model can be much larger than that in the two-qubit symmetric Rabi model.