Higher-order adiabatic elimination in atom-cavity systems and its impact on spin-squeezing generation

Abstract Spin-squeezed states are metrologically useful quantum states where entanglement allows for enhanced sensing with respect to the standard quantum limit. Key challenges include the efficient preparation of spin-squeezed states and the scalability of estimation precision with the number N of probes. Recently, in the context of the generation of spin-squeezed states via coupling of three-level atoms to an optical cavity, it was shown that increasing the atom-cavity coupling can be detrimental to spin squeezing generation, an effect that is not captured by the standard second-order adiabatic cavity removal approximation. We describe adiabatic elimination techniques to derive an effective Lindblad master equation up to third order for the atomic degrees of freedom. Numerical simulations show that the spin squeezing scalability loss is correctly reproduced by the reduced open system dynamics, highlighting the role of higher-order contributions. Furthermore, we conjecture an extension beyond leading order of the adiabatic elimination technique to the case of conditional dynamics under quantum non-demolition continuous measurement and fast cavity loss, whose reliability is again confirmed by numerical simulation of the dynamics and the corresponding behavior of spin squeezing as a function of N .