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arXiv:2003.07864 · Physical Review Letters

Exotic Photonic Molecules via Lennard-Jones-like Potentials

Przemysław Bienias, Michael J. Gullans, Marcin Kalinowski, Alexander N. Craddock, Dalia Ornelas-Huerta, S. L. Rolston, J. V. Porto, Alexey Vyacheslavovich Gorshkov

Published Aug 26, 2020• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Ultracold systems offer an unprecedented level of control of interactions between atoms. An important challenge is to achieve a similar level of control of the interactions between photons. Towards this goal, we propose a realization of a novel Lennard-Jones-like potential between photons coupled to the Rydberg states via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). This potential is achieved by tuning Rydberg states to a Förster resonance with other Rydberg states. We consider few-body problems in 1D and 2D geometries and show the existence of self-bound clusters ("molecules") of photons. We demonstrate that for a few-body problem, the multibody interactions have a significant impact on the geometry of the molecular ground state. This leads to phenomena without counterparts in conventional systems: For example, three photons in two dimensions preferentially arrange themselves in a line configuration rather than in an equilateral-triangle configuration. Our result opens a new avenue for studies of many-body phenomena with strongly interacting photons.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.125.093601

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Ultracold systems offer an unprecedented level of control of interactions between atoms. An important challenge is to achieve a similar level of control of the interactions between photons. Towards this goal, we propose a realization of a novel Lennard-Jones-like potential between photons coupled to the Rydberg states via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). This potential is achieved by tuning Rydberg states to a Förster resonance with other Rydberg states. We consider few-body problems in 1D and 2D geometries and show the existence of self-bound clusters ("molecules") of photons. We demonstrate that for a few-body problem, the multibody interactions have a significant impact on the geometry of the molecular ground state. This leads to phenomena without counterparts in conventional systems: For example, three photons in two dimensions preferentially arrange themselves in a line configuration rather than in an equilateral-triangle configuration. Our result opens a new avenue for studies of many-body phenomena with strongly interacting photons.
Long-range Rydberg interactions, in combination with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), give rise to strongly interacting photons where the strength, sign, and form of the interactions are widely tunable and controllable. Such control can be applied to both coherent and dissipative interactions, which provides the potential for generating novel few-photon states. Recently it has been shown that Rydberg-EIT is a rare system in which three-body interactions can be as strong or stronger than two-body interactions. In this work, we study three-body scattering loss for Rydberg-EIT in a wide regime of single and two-photon detunings. Our numerical simulations of the full three-body wave function and analytical estimates based on Fermi's golden rule strongly suggest that the observed features in the outgoing photonic correlations are caused by the resonant enhancement of the three-body losses.
We study electromagnetically induced transparency in a three-level ladder type configuration in ultracold atomic gases, where the upper level is an electronically highly excited Rydberg state. An effective distance dependent two-body dephasing can be induced in a regime where dipole-dipoles interaction couple nearly degenerate Rydberg pair states. We show that strong two-body dephasing can enhance the excitation blockade of neighboring Rydberg atoms. Due to the dissipative blockade, transmission of the probe light is reduced drastically by the two-body dephasing in the transparent window. The reduction of transmission is accompanied by a strong photon-photon anti-bunching. Around the Autler-Townes doublets, the photon bunching is amplified by the two-body dephasing, while transmission is largely unaffected. Besides relevant to the ongoing Rydberg atom studies, our study moreover provides a setting to explore and understand two-body dephasing dynamics in many-body systems.
We study the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect with two individually addressed four-level Rydberg atoms subjected to the interatomic van der Waals interaction. We derive an effectively atomic Raman transition model where two ladders of the usual Rydberg EIT setting terminating at the same upper Rydberg level of long radiative lifetime are turned into a Rydberg EIT $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ setup via two-photon transitions, leaving the middle levels of each ladder largely detuned from the coupling and probe laser beams. It can hence overcome the limits of applications for EIT with atoms of the ladder-type level configuration involving a strongly decaying intermediate state by inducing coherence between two ground states. By probing one of the atoms, we observe four doublets of absorption induced by the Autler-Townes splitting and the van der Waals interaction. In particular, we find that the location of the EIT center remains unchanged compared to the interatomic-interaction-free case, which demonstrates that the interference among the multiple transition channels is basically destructive. The EIT with controlled Rydberg-Rydberg interaction among a few atoms provides a versatile tool for engineering the propagation dynamics of light.
We demonstrate electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a four-level cascade-like system, where the two upper levels are Rydberg states coupled by a microwave field. A two-photon transition consisting of an off-resonant microwave field and an off-resonant optical field forms an effective coupling field to induce transparency of the probe light. We characterize the Rabi frequency of the effective coupling field, as well as the EIT microwave spectra. The results show that microwave-assisted EIT allows us to efficiently access Rydberg states with relatively high orbital angular momentum ℓ=3, which is promising for the study of exotic Rydberg molecular states.
Coupling electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom of Rydberg atoms held in optical tweezer arrays offers a flexible mechanism for creating and controlling atom-atom interactions. We find that the state-dependent coupling between Rydberg atoms and local oscillator modes gives rise to two- and three-body interactions which are controllable through the strength of the local confinement. This approach even permits the cancellation of two-body terms such that three-body interactions become dominant. We analyze the structure of these interactions on two-dimensional bipartite lattice geometries and explore the impact of three-body interactions on system ground state on a square lattice. Focusing specifically on a system of ^{87}Rb atoms, we show that the effects of the multibody interactions can be maximized via a tailored dressed potential within a trapping frequency range of the order of a few hundred kilohertz and for temperatures corresponding to a >90% occupation of the atomic vibrational ground state. These parameters, as well as the multibody induced timescales, are compatible with state-of-the-art arrays of optical tweezers. Our work shows a highly versatile handle for engineering multibody interactions of quantum many-body systems in most recent manifestations on Rydberg lattice quantum simulators.
We study the optical response of cold rubidium atoms driven into the four-level Y configuration exhibiting two high Rydberg levels in the regime of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). Atoms excited to either Rydberg level interact with each other just via self-blockade potentials (I) or also via cross blockade potentials (II). Numerical results show a few interesting quantum phenomena on the transmitted properties of a weak probe field owing to controlled single and double Rydberg blockade. In case (I), it is viable to switch between single-photon outputs with vanishing (invariable) two-photon (three-photon) correlation and photon-pair outputs with vanishing (invariable) three-photon (two-photon) correlation. Such output switch can be easily done by modulating frequencies and intensities of two strong coupling fields to create a degenerate EIT window or two separated EIT windows. In case (II), we find that two-photon and three-photon correlations decrease together at a degenerate EIT window center while increasing together between two separated EIT windows. Such consistent changes are observed because both correlations are modified by the identical polarizability degradation though depending on single and double Rydberg blockade, respectively.