Response of the Strongly-Driven Jaynes-Cummings Oscillator

We analyze the Jaynes-Cummings model of quantum optics, in the strong-dispersive regime. In the bad cavity limit and on timescales short compared to the atomic coherence time, the dynamics are those of a nonlinear oscillator. A steady-state non-perturbative semiclassical analysis exhibits a finite region of bistability delimited by a pair of critical points, unlike the usual dispersive bistability from a Kerr nonlinearity. This analysis explains our quantum trajectory simulations that show qualitative agreement with recent experiments from the field of circuit quantum electrodynamics.