Wave/particle duality in monitored Jaynes--Cummings resonances

Abstract: We operationally uncover aspects of wave/particle duality for the open driven Jaynes-Cummings (JC) model in its strong-coupling limit. We lay special emphasis on the vacuum Rabi resonance, and determine the corresponding normalized intensity-field correlation function via mapping to ordinary resonance fluorescence. We demonstrate that temporal wave-particle fluctuations of light emanating from an established vacuum Rabi resonance are explicitly non-classical, while the limit of vanishing spontaneous emission restores detailed balance. When photon blockade sets in, individual realizations show a rapidly increasing frequency of fluctuations towards the two-photon resonance, arising as a direct consequence of a resolved JC spectrum. About the two-photon resonance peak, spontaneous emissions are more likely to revive a high-frequency quantum beat in the conditioned electromagnetic field amplitude than photons escaping out of the cavity mode. The beat originates from a coherent superposition of the first excited JC couplet states, and sets the background against which nonclassical phase shifts are observed in the conditioned quadrature amplitudes. We also find that the onset of steady-state bimodality reduces the variation of the normalized intensity-field correlation, at the expense of its temporal symmetry.