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Adiabatic approximation for three qubits ultrastrongly coupled to a harmonic oscillator

We study the system involving mutual interaction between three qubits and an oscillator within the ultrastrong coupling regime. We apply adiabatic approximation approach to explore two extreme regimes: (i) the oscillator's frequency is far larger than each qubit's frequency and (ii) the qubit's frequency is far larger than the oscillator's frequency, and analyze the energy-level spectrum and the ground-state property of the qubit-oscillator system under the conditions of various system parameters. For the energy-level spectrum, we concentrate on studying the degeneracy in low energy levels. For the ground state, we focus on its nonclassical properties that are necessary for preparing the nonclassical states. We show that the minimum qubit-oscillator coupling strength needed for generating the nonclassical states of the Schrödinger-cat type in the oscillator is just one half of that in the Rabi model. We find that the qubit-qubit entanglement in the ground state vanishes if the qubit-oscillator coupling strength is strong enough, for which the entropy of three qubits keeps larger than one. We also observe the phase-transition-like behavior in the regime where the qubit's frequency is far larger than the oscillator's frequency.