Quantum many-body models with cold atoms coupled to photonic crystals

By James S. Douglas, H. Habibian, Chen-Lung Hung, Alexey V. Gorshkov, H. Jeff Kimble, Darrick E. Chang. Nature Photonics, 2013

474 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using cold atoms to simulate strongly interacting quantum systems is an exciting frontier of physics. However, because atoms are nominally neutral point particles, this limits the types of interaction that can be produced. We propose to use the powerful new platform of cold atoms trapped near nanophotonic systems to extend these limits, enabling a novel quantum material in which atomic spin degrees of freedom, motion and photons strongly couple over long distances. In this system, an atom trapped near a photonic crystal seeds a localized, tunable cavity mode around the atomic position. We find that this effective cavity facilitates interactions with other atoms within the cavity length, in a way that can be made robust against realistic imperfections. Finally, we show that such phenomena should be accessible using one-dimensional photonic crystal waveguides in which coupling to atoms has already been experimentally demonstrated. Researchers propose that a cold atom in a one-dimensional photonic crystal waveguide can form a cavity. This system should allow interaction with other atoms within the effective cavity length.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b8ebff9db23ab848d5d80b33589b7d808545c35

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, methodology): “Significantly, it was shown that for 1D waveguides, an intuitive, effective model could achieve good quantitative agreement with numerical simulations of the full Green’s function (Douglas et al., 2015).”
Tunable-range, photon-mediated atomic interactions in multimode cavity QED (2017, background): “However, it has been suggested that this challenge may be met either by employing networks of single-mode cavities [20–22], using squeezed light to engineer interactions [23], using photonic crystal waveguides [24,25], or using a single multimode cavity [13,17,26].”
Atom-light interactions in quasi-one-dimensional nanostructures: A Green's-function perspective (2016, background): “The band-gap region of a photonic crystal waveguide (PCW) is a very appealing scenario to explore coherent atom-atom interactions, as light cannot propagate, and atoms interact with each other through evanescent fields [32], as depicted in Fig.”
New frontiers for quantum gases of polar molecules (2016, background): “Of course, many other experimental platforms are also being pursued that feature long-range interactions, including highly magnetic atoms [7, 8], trapped ions [9], superconducting circuits [10], Rydberg atoms [11], and atoms coupled to photonic structures [12].”
Quantum Electrodynamics in a Topological Waveguide (2020, unknown): “[20] J.”
Oscillating bound states for a giant atom (2019, background): “These systems can exhibit nonexponential relaxation [47,48] and bound states [34,49–60], which can be harnessed for quantum simulations [61,62].”