Within the capacity of current experiments, we design a composite atom-cavity system with a common bath, in which the decay channels of the atom and the cavity mode interfere with each other. When the direct atom-cavity coupling is absent, the system can be trapped in a quasidark state (the coherent superposition of excited states for the atom and the cavity mode) without decay even in the presence of the bath. When the atom directly couples with the cavity, the largest decay rate of the composite system will surpass the sum of the two subsystems while the smallest decay rate may achieve 0. This is manifested in the transmission spectrum, where the vacuum Rabi splitting shows an obvious asymmetric character.

• Received 27 March 2013
• Revised 12 June 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.89.013809