Sinusoidally Modulated Vacuum Rabi Oscillation of a Two-Level Atom in an Optomechanical Cavity

Abstract: We study the coherent dynamics of an excited two-level atom in a vacuum optomechanical cavity and find that the original atom-cavity Rabi oscillation is sinusoidally modulated by the light-mechanics coupling as the Rabi splitting is on resonance with the mechanical mode. We develop an analytic model in a three-dimensional Hilbert subspace to explain this phenomenon and employ numerical simulations of the density-matrix master equation to confirm our analysis. We also show that the modulated Rabi oscillation survives in presence of dissipations and other non-ideal factors.