Off-diagonal electron-phonon coupling effects on two-level system dynamics

Electromagnetically coupled two-level systems play a central role in several condensed matter components being considered for quantum information processing applications. If the states couple to phonon excitations, their electromagnetic response is altered via phonon-assisted transitions and lifetime broadening. The former has been treated extensively for a number of specific two-level systems (e.g., excitons in artificial quantum dots, localized states associated with impurities or defects, etc.), but the latter has received less attention. Here we study a microscopic model of the dipole transition of a two-level system under the influence of both diagonal and nondiagonal interactions with a bath of phonons. Our results capture both the influence of the frequency distribution of phonons on the relative spectral weight of the zero-phonon transition and the phonon sidebands, and the broadening of the zero-phonon line due to nondiagonal electron-phonon coupling. We use a formalism that includes non-Markovian effects related to the feedback mechanism between the two-level system and the phonon bath. For simplified forms of the phonon spectral functions we provide analytical expressions up to second order in the coupling strength that demonstrate the importance of including both forms of electron phonon coupling in studies of these systems. Our formalism can be generalized to higher orders of coupling and for realistic phonon spectral functions.