Quantum phase transitions of light

By A. Greentree, C. Tahan, J. Cole, Lloyd Christopher L. Hollenberg. 2006

598 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ability to conduct experiments at length scales and temperatures at which interesting and potentially useful quantum-mechanical phenomena emerge in condensed-matter or atomic systems is now commonplace. In optics, though, the weakness with which photons interact with each other makes exploring such behaviour more difficult. Here we describe an optical system that exhibits strongly correlated dynamics on a mesoscopic scale. By adding photons to a two-dimensional array of coupled optical cavities each containing a single two-level atom in the photon-blockade regime, we form dressed states, or polaritons, that are both long-lived and strongly interacting. Our results predict that at zero temperature the system will undergo a characteristic Mott insulator (excitations localized on each site) to superfluid (excitations delocalized across the lattice) quantum phase transition. Moreover, the ability to couple light to and from individual cavities of this system could be useful in the realization of tuneable quantum simulators and other quantum-mechanical devices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/001efc4b30c8a4959d5f27867526d083d8c4be3e

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Circuit quantum electrodynamics (2010, background): “There are even proposals to build a lattice of Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonians, which resembles the Bose–Hubbard model [141] and can display a superfluid–Mott insulator transition [142].”
An elementary quantum network of single atoms in optical cavities (2012, background): “plethora of accessible topologies of cavity quantum networks are not only an important resource for quantum information processing—cavity networks also constitute a suitable paradigm for investigating emergent phenomena such as quantum phase transitions of light [4–6] or percolation of entanglement ”
Geometry of quantum phase transitions (2019, unknown): “Examples of suitable experimental platforms for the implementation and simulation of such an open many-body framework range from ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices [124, 364], to ion traps [365, 366], to cavity microarrays [367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 143] and Rydberg atoms [373, 374].”
Quantum simulation with interacting photons (2016, methodology): “The first study by Greentree et al [93] used a mean-field approach that”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “The extension of photon blockade to many-cavity configurations so as to obtain complex strongly correlated manyphoton states started attracting the interest of researchers in the mid-2000s with several proposals for how to realize Mottinsulator states of light (Greentree et al., 2006; Hartmann, Bran”
Strongly correlated photons on a chip (2011, background): “Depending on the particular device, however, the effect is more or less pronounced [4].”