Angular Momentum-Dependent Spectral Shift in Chiral Vacuum Cavities

Abstract

Based on a hybrid light-matter unitary transformation for cavity quantum electrodynamics, we investigate the spectral shift of an atom induced by quantum fluctuations in a chiral vacuum cavity. Remarkably, we find an intriguing angular momentum-dependent shift in the spectra of bound states. Our approach shows promise in going beyond traditional perturbative methods and demonstrates effectiveness even in the strong-coupling limit, as evidenced by our numerical benchmarks in the case of a two-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator. In addition, we establish a cavity-interaction picture for calculating the chiral vacuum Rabi oscillation in the strong-coupling limit for a generic central potential. The anomalous spectral shift revealed in this study possesses both fundamental and practical significance and could be readily observed in experiments.