Crystallization of strongly interacting photons in a nonlinear optical fibre

By Darrick E. Chang, V. Gritsev, Giovanna Morigi, V. Vuleti'c, Mikhail D. Lukin, E. Demler. 2007

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding strongly correlated quantum systems is a central problem in many areas of physics. The collective behaviour of interacting particles gives rise to diverse fundamental phenomena such as confinement in quantum chromodynamics, electron fractionalization in the quantum Hall regime and phase transitions in unconventional superconductors and quantum magnets. Such systems typically involve massive particles, but optical photons can also interact with one another in a nonlinear medium. In practice, however, such interactions are often very weak. Here we describe a technique that enables the creation of a strongly correlated quantum gas of photons using one-dimensional optical systems with tight field confinement and coherent photon trapping techniques. The confinement enables the generation of large, tunable optical nonlinearities via the interaction of photons with a nearby cold atomic gas. In its extreme, we show that a quantum light field can undergo fermionization in such one-dimensional media, which can be probed via standard photon correlation measurements. Interactions between photons are typically extremely weak. But when light pulses are confined to an optical waveguide and manipulated with nearby cold atoms, strongly interacting photons can be created that may even undergo crystallization, as is now shown theoretically.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56ef613a8bc48167c1c982e6c81d39a27513ccbb

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Cavity QED with atomic mirrors (2012, background): “Thus far, we have investigated the case of a single excitation, but we anticipate that nonlinear and many-body behavior involving atoms and photons [47–50] will be an interesting topic for further exploration.”
Quantum many‐body phenomena in coupled cavity arrays (2008, methodology): “These include photonic Mott insulators [25, 26], spin models [27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32], dynamical effects [33, 34, 35, 36, 37], multi component models [38], phase diagrams [39, 40, 41, 42, 43], alternative physical realisatio ns [44, 45 , 46, 47, 48], experimental signatures [49, 50] and quantum inf”
Colloquium: Strongly interacting photons in one-dimensional continuum (2016, background): “06 59 0v 2 [ qu an t- ph ] 1 4 Fe b 20 17 2 and quantum many-body behavior in light (Carusotto and Ciuti, 2013; Chang et al., 2008).”
Colloquium: Nonequilibrium dynamics of closed interacting quantum systems (2010, background): “There have been several proposals (Chang et al., 2008; Greentree et al., 2006) for the dynamical creation of strongly correlated photonic states using photon-photon interactions mediated by a nonlinear optical medium.”
Microwave photonics with superconducting quantum circuits (2017, unknown): “three [256, 279, 624, 684, 685, 697, 698] and more levels [656, 678, 699, 700].”