Two-photon exchange between two three-level atoms in separate cavities

The temporal evolution of two coupled cavities, each containing a single three-level atom, is studied when the cavities exchange two coherent photons. The general state of the system is a linear superposition of symmetric and antisymmetric states with the symmetric states controlled by two of the four eigenfrequencies and the antisymmetric states by the other two. The system undergoes Rabi oscillations between the two symmetric (antisymmetric) states. There is state transfer between the cavities when both atoms are in the ground state and two photons are exchanged. In addition, there is also Rabi ''flopping'' whereby one atom is in the excited state and the other in the ground state and the roles are reversed in a periodic fashion by the exchange of two photons. The generation of entanglement can be explicitly given as a function of time. Models of coupled cavities are of interest in distributed quantum information and computation.