Quantum signalling in cavity QED

Abstract

We consider quantum signalling between two-level quantum systems in a cavity, in the pertubative regime of the earliest possible arrival times of the signal. We present two main results: First we find that, perhaps surprisingly, the analogue of amplitude modulated signalling (Alice using her energy eigenstates |g>, |e>, as in the Fermi problem) is generally sub-optimal for communication. Namely, e.g., phase modulated signalling (Alice using, e.g., |+>,|e>-states) overcomes the quantum noise already at a lower order in perturbation theory. Second, we study the effect of mode truncations that are commonly used in cavity QED on the modelling of the communication between two-level atoms. We show that, on general grounds, namely for causality to be preserved, the UV cutoff must scale at least polynomially with the desired accuracy of the predictions.