Photon-resolved Floquet theory. I. Full counting statistics of the driving field in Floquet systems

Floquet theory and other established semiclassical approaches are widely used methods to predict the state of externally driven quantum systems, yet they do not allow the prediction of the state of the photonic driving field. To overcome this shortcoming, the photon-resolved Floquet theory (PRFT) was developed recently [], which deploys concepts from full-counting statistics to predict the statistics of the photon flux between several coherent driving modes. In this paper, we study in detail the scaling properties of the PRFT in the semi-classical regime. We find that there is an ambiguity in the definition of the moment-generating function, such that different versions of this function produce the same photonic probability distribution in the semiclassical limit, and generate the same leading-order terms of the moments and cumulants. Using this ambiguity, we establish a simple expression for the Kraus operators, which describe the decoherence dynamics of the driven quantum system appearing as a consequence of the light-matter interaction. The PRFT will pave the way for improved quantum sensing methods, e.g., for spectroscopic quantum sensing protocols, reflectometry in semiconductor nanostructures, and other applications, where the detailed knowledge of the photonic probability distribution is necessary. Published by the American Physical Society 2024