Atom-Field-Medium Interactions II: Covariance Matrix Dynamics for $N$ Harmonic Atoms in a Dielectric-Altered Quantum Field and Effects of Dielectric on Atom-Field Entanglement

Abstract

We continue our investigation of multi-partite open quantum systems comprising layers of structure using the atom-field-medium interactions as a familiarly important example. Same as in Paper I~\cite{HH24} we consider a system of $N$ harmonic oscillators, modeling the internal degrees of freedom (idf) of $N$ neutral atoms interacting with a scalar quantum field altered by the presence of a dielectric medium. Different from Paper I, which uses the graded influence action formalism, here, taking advantage of the Gaussian nature of our extended system's interactions, we use the quantum Langevin equation method to calculate the time evolution of the covariance matrix elements of the quantum correlation functions of the idfs of the $N$ system-atoms in a dielectric-altered quantum field. The covariance matrix is particularly useful for extracting quantum informational properties of a Gaussian system related to quantum correlations, such as quantum entanglement. As an illustration of the method we calculate the entanglement between one system atom and the ambient quantum field outside the dielectric half-space, measured by the purity function and the von Neumann entropy. We highlight one somewhat peculiar feature in our results and one important technical issue: The special feature refers to the non-monotonic behavior of the purity function when the atom is positioned very close to the dielectric surface. By deriving the Robertson-Schr\"odinger function and displaying a similar qualitative behavior under these conditions we attribute this novelty to a manifestation of the uncertainty relation. The technical issue refers to the order-reduction scheme to remove the third time derivative term in the Langevin equation for the idfs of the atom. We point out the inconsistencies in the traditional treatments and propose a new consistent scheme of order reduction for Gaussian open systems.