Abstract
The link of two concepts, indistinguishability and entanglement, with the energy-time uncertainty principle is demonstrated in a system composed of two strongly coupled bosonic modes. Working in the limit of a short interaction time, we find that the inclusion of the antiresonant terms to the coupling Hamiltonian leads the system to relax to a state which is not the ground state of the system. This effect occurs passively by just presence of the antiresonant terms and is explained in terms of the time-energy uncertainty principle for the simple reason that at a very short interaction time, the uncertainty in the energy is of order of the energy of a single excitation, thereby leading to a distribution of the population among the zero, singly and doubly excited states. The population distribution, correlations, and entanglement are shown to substantially dependent on whether the modes decay independently or collectively to an exterior reservoir. In particular, when the modes decay independently with equal rates, entanglement with the complete distinguishability of the modes is observed. The modes can be made mutually coherent if they decay with unequal rates. However, the visibility in the single-photon interference cannot exceed 50%. When the modes experience collective damping, they are indistinguishable even if decay with equal rates and the visibility can, in principle, be as large as unity. We find that this feature derives from the decay of the system to a pure entangled state rather than the expected mixed state. When the modes decay with equal rates, the steady-state values of the density matrix elements are found dependent on their initial values.