Dissipation in the broadband and ultrastrong coupling regimes of cavity quantum electrodynamics: an ab initio...

Phenomenological approaches to photon loss have long been the workhorse of cavity-QED, but prove inadequate in the presence of sufficiently broadband light-matter interactions. We present a rigorous and ab initio derivation of a quantum master equation for a quantized optical cavity mode coupled to a dipole, using a quasinormal mode (QNM) quantization procedure for plasmonic and dielectric open-system cavity-QED, which is valid in broadband light-matter interaction regimes, including ultrastrong coupling (USC). The theory supports general three-dimensional resonators with arbitrary dispersion and loss, and thus can be applied to a wide range of realistic open cavities. Our ab initio and gauge-invariant approach fully recovers a recent result for the spectral density of a quantized cavity with a single dipole and reveals important departures from previous heuristic assumptions about system-reservoir coupling. We identify a new criterion for what we term the "broadband dissipative" regime of cavity-QED, where phenomenological models require corrections in accordance with the intrinsic and spatially-dependent complex phase of the QNM, and also shed light on fundamental limits to single-mode models in extreme coupling regimes. Using experimentally motivated plasmonic and dielectric cavity examples, we show validity ranges of our QNM master equation and spectral USC calculations, and discuss prospects for near-term experimental observation of the broadband dissipative effects.