Dissipative dynamics in a tunable Rabi dimer with periodic harmonic driving

Recent progress on qubit manipulation allows application of periodic driving signals on qubits. In this study, a harmonic driving field is added to a Rabi dimer to engineer photon and qubit dynamics in a circuit quantum electrodynamics device. To model environmental effects, qubits in the Rabi dimer are coupled to a phonon bath with a sub-Ohmic spectral density. A nonperturbative treatment, the Dirac-Frenkel time-dependent variational principle together with the multiple Davydov D₂ ansatz, is employed to explore the dynamical behavior of the tunable Rabi dimer. In the absence of the phonon bath, the amplitude damping of the photon number oscillation is greatly suppressed by the driving field, and photons can be created, thanks to the resonance between the periodic driving field and the photon frequency. In the presence of the phonon bath, one can still change the photon numbers in two resonators and indirectly alter the photon imbalance in the Rabi dimer by directly varying the driving signal in one qubit. It is shown that qubit states can be manipulated directly by the harmonic driving. The environment is found to strengthen the interqubit asymmetry induced by the external driving, opening up a new venue to engineer the qubit states.