Emergence of chaos and controlled photon transfer in a cavity-QED network

We develop optimal protocols for efficient photon transfer in a cavity-QED network. This is executed through stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) scheme, where time-varying capacitive couplings (with carefully chosen sweep rate) play a key role. We work in a regime where semiclassical limit is valid and we investigate the dynamical chaos caused by the light-matter coupling. We show that this plays a crucial role in estimating the lower bound on the sweep rate for ensuring efficient photon transfer. We present Hermitian as well as an open quantum system extension of the model. Without loss of generality, we study the three cavity and four cavity case and our results can be adapted to larger networks. Our analysis is also significant in designing transport protocols aimed for nonlinear open quantum systems in general.