Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes--Cummings model

Abstract

Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system--reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes--Cummings model using a Moore--Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini--Kossakowski--Sudarshan--Lindblad master equation under the Born--Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes--Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.