Dipartimento di Scienze di Base e Applicate per l'Ingegneria

Abstract: The semiclassical Rabi model of light-matter interaction goes back to Rabi's
description and development of nuclear magnetic resonance technology in the 1940's,
and Rabi provided a formal proof of his so-called rotating wave approximation, that
enabled explicit and crucial computations. A few years later, Jaynes and Cummings
came up with a quantum mechanical analogue, leading to the Jaynes-Cummings model,
which has become one of the main tools of modern quantum optics with ramifications
in quantum computing. Despite a number of qualitative and formal arguments as to why
the rotating wave approximation in the latter case should be correct, a rigorous
proof was missing for more than 50 years. The goal of this talk is to provide some
generally accessible background information about the underlying models and the
approximation and then a sketch of the proof along with some experimentally
interesting error bounds. (Based on joint work with D. Burgarth, P. Facchi, M.
Ligabò)