Benchmarking semiclassical and perturbative methods for real-time simulations of cavity-bound emission and...

We benchmark a selection of semiclassical and perturbative dynamics techniques by investigating the correlated evolution of a cavity-bound atomic system to assess their applicability to study problems involving strong light-matter interactions in quantum cavities. The model system of interest features spontaneous emission, interference, and strong coupling behavior and necessitates the consideration of vacuum fluctuations and correlated light-matter dynamics. We compare a selection of approximate dynamics approaches including fewest switches surface hopping (FSSH), multitrajectory Ehrenfest dynamics, linearized semiclassical dynamics, and partially linearized semiclassical dynamics. Furthermore, investigating self-consistent perturbative methods, we apply the Bogoliubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon hierarchy in the second Born approximation. With the exception of fewest switches surface hopping, all methods provide a reasonable level of accuracy for the correlated light-matter dynamics, with most methods lacking the capacity to fully capture interference effects.