Bulletin of the American Physical Society
47th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics
Volume 61, Number 8
Monday–Friday, May 23–27, 2016; Providence, Rhode Island
Session H9: Rydberg Polaritons and Rydberg EIT |
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Chair: Mary Lyon, Joint Quantum Institute Room: 556AB |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 10:30AM - 10:42AM |
H9.00001: Effective Field Theory for Rydberg Polaritons M. J. Gullans, Y. Wang, J. D. Thompson, Q.-Y. Liang, V. Vuletic, M. D. Lukin, A. V. Gorshkov Photons can be made to strongly interact by dressing them with atomic Rydberg states under conditions of electromagnetic induced transparency.~ Probing Rydberg polaritons in the few-body limit, recent experiments were able to observe non-perturbative two-body effects including: single photon switching and the formation of bound states.~ Although the two-body problem is amenable to exact solutions, such approaches quickly become intractable for more than two particles.~ To overcome this problem, we study non-perturbative effects in N-body scattering of Rydberg polaritons using effective field theory (EFT).~ For attractive interactions, we show how a suitably long medium can be used to prepare shallow N-body bound states in one dimension.~ We verify this prediction for two and three photons using full numerical simulations.~ We then consider conditions under which the effective interactions are repulsive and study two and three photon transmission.~ Finally, we show how to go beyond EFT by measuring the three-body contact force or, alternatively, scattering at high relative momenta. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 10:42AM - 10:54AM |
H9.00002: Three-body interactions between slow light Rydberg polaritons Krzysztof Jachymski, Przemyslaw Bienias, Hans Peter B\"{u}chler Rydberg polaritons have recently emerged as a promising platform for nonlinear optics and photonic quantum simulation. They are created in an atomic medium using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) scheme involving a Rydberg excitation. Cavity photons can be used in this context to create long-lived, coherent samples consisting of several polaritons. We show that in addition to effective two-body interaction potential inherited from the Rydberg states, the polaritons also exhibit effective three-body interactions. For attractive two-body forces, the three-body term induces short-range repulsion. We analyze the impact of this interaction on the three-body photonic bound states in one-dimensional geometry and discuss the prospects for engineering novel quantum states. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 10:54AM - 11:06AM |
H9.00003: Storage enhanced non-linearities in a cold Rydberg ensemble Emanuele Distante, Auxiliadora Padron-Brito, Matteo Cristiani, David Paredes-Barato, Hugues de Riedmatten The possibility to control the interaction between photons provided by highly nonlinear media is a key ingredient to the goal of quantum information processing using photons and a unique tool to study the dynamics of the many-body correlated system. To mediate this interaction, one can exploit electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) to map the state of the photons into atomic coherence in the form of Rydberg dark-state polaritons. The combination of EIT with the nonlinear interaction between Rydberg atoms provides and effective interaction between photons. By measuring the dynamics of stored Rydberg polaritons, we experimentally demonstrate that storing a probe pulse as Rydberg polaritons strongly enhances the Rydberg mediated interaction compared to the slow-propagation case. We show that the process is characterized by two time scales. We measure a strong enhancement of the interaction at short time scales. By measuring the time-dependent coherence of the stored polariton, we also show that the long time scale dynamics is dominated by Rydberg induced dephasing of the multiparticle components of the state. Our results have a direct consequence in Rydberg quantum optics and enable the test of new theories of strongly interacting Rydberg systems. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 11:06AM - 11:18AM |
H9.00004: Observation of Cavity Rydberg Polaritons Alexandros Georgakopoulos, Ningyuan Jia, Albert Ryou, Nathan Schine, Ariel Sommer, Jonathan Simon We demonstrate hybridization of optical cavity photons with atomic Rydberg excitations using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The resulting dark state Rydberg polaritons exhibit a compressed frequency spectrum and enhanced lifetime indicating strong light-matter mixing. We study the coherence properties of cavity Rydberg polaritons and identify the generalized EIT linewidth for optical cavities. Strong collective coupling suppresses polariton losses due to inhomogeneous broadening, which we demonstrate by using different Rydberg levels with a range of polarizabilities. Our results point the way towards using cavity Rydberg polaritons as a platform for creating photonic quantum materials. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 11:18AM - 11:30AM |
H9.00005: Electromagnetically induced transparency with Rydberg atoms inside a high-finesse optical cavity Jiteng Sheng, Santosh Kumar, Jonathon Sedlacek, Yuanxi Chao, Haoquan Fan, James Shaffer We present experimental work on the observation of Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) inside a high-finesse optical cavity. We show that a cold atomic cloud with controllable number of atoms can be transported into the cavity by using a focus-tunable lens. Rydberg atoms are excited via a two-photon transition in a ladder-type EIT configuration. A three-peak structure in the cavity transmission can be observed when Rydberg EIT atoms are generated inside the cavity. The two side peaks are caused by ``bright state polaritons'', while the central peak corresponds to a ``dark-state polariton'' The cavity Rydberg EIT system can be useful for single photon generation using the Rydberg blockade effect, studying many-body physics, and generating novel quantum states amongst many other applications. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 11:30AM - 11:42AM |
H9.00006: Towards Rydberg quantum optics in a hollow core fiber Mohammad Noaman, Maria Langbecker, Patrick Windpassinger Cold atoms inside hollow-core fibers present a promising candidate to study strongly coupled light-matter systems. Adding coherent quantum state control and the intriguing features of Rydberg atoms, i.e. long range dipolar interactions leading to a dipole blockade, to the system should allow for the generation of exotic polaritonic and photonic states. This talk will review the current status of our experimental setup where laser cooled Rubidium atoms are transported into a hollow-core fiber. We present the first measurements of Rydberg EIT in the dipole trap in front of the fiber and discuss the progress towards Rydberg physics in a quasi-one-dimensional geometry. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 11:42AM - 11:54AM |
H9.00007: Spin Exchange in Rydberg EIT Travis Nicholson, Jeff Thompson, Qiyu Liang, Sergio Cantu, Aditya Venkatramani, Thomas Pohl, Soonwon Choi, Mikhail Lukin, Vladan Vuletic The realization of strong optical nonlinearities between two photons has been a longstanding goal in quantum science. We achieve large single-photon-level nonlinearities with Rydberg EIT, which combines slow light techniques with strongly interacting Rydberg states. For two Rydberg atoms in the same state, a Van der Waals interaction is the dominant coupling mechanism. Inherently stronger dipole-dipole interactions are also possible between atoms in different Rydberg states. Using light storage and microwave resonances, we study the effect of dipole-dipole interactions in Rydberg EIT. We observe a coherent spin exchange effect for pairs of states dominated by dipole-dipole interactions. Spin exchange manifests as an increase in optical transmission through a cold Rubidium gas that is highly dissipative in the presence of Van der Waals interactions. We also observe a controlled $\pi/2$ phase shift due to this effect, which paves the way for robust, universal all-optical quantum gates. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 11:54AM - 12:06PM |
H9.00008: Dynamical Evolution of Interacting Photon Pulses in Rydberg Medium Bing He, Liu Yang, Jin-Hui Wu, Zhaoyang Zhang, Min Xiao We present a study to simulate the absorption and propagation of single photon pulses under their mutual effective interaction in Rydberg atomic ensemble.The study is based on the complete dynamics of the involved quantum fields in Rydberg medium of electromagnetically induced transparency, and considers the tunable control fields to stop and regenerate photon pulses. We find that photons of opposite-sign detunings can have distinct dynamical behaviors when they approach each other. The space-time dependent dissipation of photons under mutual interaction and the passages toward the stopped photons with different control fields are also illustrated in terms of the evolutions of their quantum field profiles. These processes can be applied to implementing various quantum devices such as photon switchers and photon-photon gates. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 12:06PM - 12:18PM |
H9.00009: Detrimental effects of molecular resonances on Rydberg blockade Andrei Derevianko, Peter Komar, Turker Topcu, Ronen Kroeze, M Lukin We study the effect of resonances associated with complex molecular interaction of Rydberg atoms on Rydberg blockade. We show that densely-spaced molecular potentials between doubly-excited atomic pairs become unavoidably resonant with the optical excitation at short interatomic separations. Such molecular resonances limit the coherent control of individual excitations in Rydberg blockade. As an illustration, we compute the molecular interaction potentials of Rb atoms near the $100s$ states asymptote to characterize such detrimental molecular resonances, determine the resonant loss rate to molecules and inhomogeneous light shifts. Techniques to avoid the undesired effect of molecular resonances are discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016 12:18PM - 12:30PM |
H9.00010: A mesoscopic Rydberg impurity in an atomic quantum gas Richard Schmidt, Hossein Sadeghpour, Eugene Demler Impurity problems have been at the forefront of research in condensed matter physics for several decades. In this talk, we show that Rydberg impurity excitations in ultracold quantum gases present a new frontier in impurity research. Here vastly different energy scales compete, signified in deeply bound Rydberg molecules of mesoscopic size. This situation poses a new challenge for theoretical physics and necessitates the confluence of methods ranging from mesoscopic to atomic physics. In our work, we develop a novel many-body theory for the non-equilibrium dynamics of giant impurity excitations Bose gases. Such single Rydberg impurity excitations have recently been observed, and we demonstrate that the observations can be understood from our theoretical approach which incorporates atomic and many-body theory. The crossover from few-body dynamics to quantum many-body collective behavior - manifest in the appearance of a novel superpolaronic state - is elucidated in our unified functional determinant approach, valid at zero and finite temperature. The time-dependent formalism is not restricted to Rydberg systems but can be generally applied to impurities in bosonic and fermionic environments and opens new possibilities to study impurity dynamics in mesoscopic systems. [Preview Abstract] |
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