Breaking the Exponential: Decoherence-Driven Power-Law Spontaneous Emission in Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics

Quantum Physics arXiv:2601.05884 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 9 Jan 2026] Title:Breaking the Exponential: Decoherence-Driven Power-Law Spontaneous Emission in Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics Authors:Stefano Longhi View a PDF of the paper titled Breaking the Exponential: Decoherence-Driven Power-Law Spontaneous Emission in Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics, by Stefano Longhi View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We investigate the spontaneous emission of a two-level system coupled to a photonic waveguide, showing that dynamical dephasing in the photon modes profoundly alters the decay law. In the absence of dephasing, the emitter displays conventional exponential decay followed by a long-time power-law tail -- observable only at extremely low survival probabilities. Strikingly, when dephasing is introduced, a robust power-law decay emerges already at short times, driven by photon diffusion in the dynamically disordered environment rather than spectral edge effects. These results reveal a novel, decoherence-induced mechanism for non-exponential spontaneous emission in waveguide QED platforms. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Optics (physics.optics) Cite as: arXiv:2601.05884 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2601.05884v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.05884 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Stefano Longhi [view email] [v1] Fri, 9 Jan 2026 16:04:22 UTC (3,120 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Breaking the Exponential: Decoherence-Driven Power-Law Spontaneous Emission in Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics, by Stefano LonghiView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-01 Change to browse by: physics physics.optics References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)