Spontaneous decay of artificial atoms in a three-qubit system

We study the evolution of qubits amplitudes in a one-dimensional chain consisting of three equidistantly spaced noninteracting qubits embedded in an open waveguide. The study is performed in the frame of single-excitation subspace, where the only qubit in the chain is initially excited. We show that the dynamics of qubits amplitudes crucially depend on the value of kd, where k is the wave vector and d is a distance between neighbor qubits. If kd is equal to an integer multiple of $$\pi $$ π , then the qubits are excited to a stationary level. In this case, it is the dark states which prevent qubits from decaying to zero, even though they do not contribute to the output spectrum of photon emission. For other values of kd, the excitations of qubits exhibit the damping oscillations which represent the vacuum Rabi oscillations in a three-qubit system. In this case, the output spectrum of photon radiation is determined by a subradiant state which has the lowest decay rate. We also investigated the case with the frequency of a central qubit being different from that of the edge qubits. In this case, the qubits’ decay rates can be controlled by the frequency detuning between the central and the edge qubits.