Prospects for observing dynamical and anti- dynamical Casimir effects in circuit QED due to fast modulation of qubit parameters

Abstract: We consider the nonstationary circuit QED architecture, where a single artificial two-level atom interacts with a cavity field mode under external modulation of one or more system parameters. Two different approaches are employed to study the effects of Markovian dissipation on modulation-induced transitions between the atom-field dressed states: the standard master equation of Quantum Optics and the recently formulated dressed-picture master equation. We estimate the associated transition rates and show that photon generation from vacuum ("dynamical Casimir effect", DCE) and coherent photon annihilation from nonvacuum states ("Anti-DCE") are possible with the current state-of-the-art parameters.