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Abstract

We study the vacuum Rabi splitting of a qubit ultrastrongly coupled to a high-Q cavity mode and a radiation reservoir. Three methods are employed: a numerically exact variational approach with a multiple Davydov ansatz, the rotating-wave approximation (RWA), and the transformed RWA. Agreement between the variational results and the transformed RWA results is found in the regime of validity of the latter, where the RWA breaks down completely. We illustrate that the Lamb shift plays an essential role in modifying the vacuum Rabi splitting in the ultrastrong coupling regime, leading to off-resonant qubit-cavity coupling even though the cavity frequency equals the bare transition frequency of the qubit. Specifically, the emission spectrum exhibits one broad low-frequency peak and one narrow high-frequency peak in the presence of relatively weak cavity-qubit coupling. As the cavity-qubit coupling increases, the low-frequency peak narrows while the high-frequency peak broadens until they have similar widths.