An open quantum system operated at the spectral singularities where dimensionality reduces, known as exceptional points (EPs), demonstrates distinguishing behavior from the Hermitian counterpart. Here, we present an analytical description of local density of states (LDOS) for microcavity featuring chiral EPs, and unveil the anomalous spontaneous emission dynamics from a quantum emitter (QE) due to the non-Lorentzian response of EPs. Specifically, we reveal that a squared Lorentzian term of LDOS contributed by chiral EPs can destructively interfere with the linear Lorentzian profile, resulting in the null Purcell enhancement to a QE with special transition frequency, which we call EP induced transparency. While for the case of constructive interference, the squared Lorentzian term can narrow the linewidth of Rabi splitting even below that of bare components, and thus significantly suppresses the decay of Rabi oscillation. Interestingly, we further find that an open microcavity with chiral EPs supports atom-photon bound states for population trapping and decay suppression in long-time dynamics. As applications, we demonstrate the advantages of microcavity operated at chiral EPs in achieving high-fidelity entanglement generation and high-efficiency single-photon generation. Our work unveils the exotic cavity quantum electrodynamics unique to chiral EPs, which opens the door for controlling light-matter interaction at the quantum level through non-Hermiticity, and holds great potential in building high-performance quantum-optics devices.
An open quantum system operated at the spectral singularities where dimensionality reduces, known as exceptional points (EPs), demonstrates distinguishing behavior from the Hermitian counterpart. Here, we present an analytical description of local density of states (LDOS) for microcavity featuring chiral EPs, and unveil the anomalous spontaneous emission dynamics from a quantum emitter (QE) due to the non-Lorentzian response of EPs. Specifically, we reveal that a squared Lorentzian term of LDOS contributed by chiral EPs can destructively interfere with the linear Lorentzian profile, resulting in the null Purcell enhancement to a QE with special transition frequency, which we call EP induced transparency. While for the case of constructive interference, the squared Lorentzian term can narrow the linewidth of Rabi splitting even below that of bare components, and thus significantly suppresses the decay of Rabi oscillation. Interestingly, we further find that an open microcavity with chiral EPs supports atom-photon bound states for population trapping and decay suppression in long-time dynamics. As applications, we demonstrate the advantages of microcavity operated at chiral EPs in achieving high-fidelity entanglement generation and high-efficiency single-photon generation. Our work unveils the exotic cavity quantum electrodynamics unique to chiral EPs, which opens the door for controlling light-matter interaction at the quantum level through non-Hermiticity, and holds great potential in building high-performance quantum-optics devices.
The ability to harness the ubiquitous dissipation in realistic quantum systems holds great promise for developing advanced quantum technologies. In particular, the presence of dissipation violates the fundamental premise of Hermiticity and results in the non-Hermitian singularities associated with coalesced eigenstates in parameter space known as exceptional points (EPs), providing a new strategy to manipulate quantum states in both dynamical evolution and stationary limit. In this work, we show that for a microcavity supporting chiral EPs, light-matter interaction between the cavity photons and a quantum emitter can be flexibly switched from coherent to fully dissipative by tuning the phase factor of a complex coupling rate, an additional degree of freedom offered by the chiral EPs of a microcavity. The tunable coherent and dissipative light-matter interactions are evidenced by the distinguishing quantum dynamics and optical spectra, where the dispersion of a coupled quantum system changes from level repulsion to level attraction. While dissipation is generally considered fatal for quantum effects and should be suppressed, here we find that the EP-enabled dissipative light-matter interaction shows a unique advantage in achieving high-efficiency single-photon emission in a weak-coupling regime through the non-Hermitian photon blockade, which originates from the anharmonicity in the losses instead of in the eigenenergy levels for the conventional photon blockade (CPB). A giant enhancement of more than 5 orders of magnitude is found for both photon correlations and intensity compared to that of CPB in coherent light-matter interaction. We expect our work to enrich the understanding of light-matter interaction in open photonic resonators and provide insight into the manipulation of quantum states and quantum correlations in a wide variety of quantum systems by utilizing the non-Hermicity of electromagnetic environments.
Exceptional points (EPs) are the non-Hermitian singularities in the parameters space of open physical systems, where the eigenenergies and associated eigenstates coalesce. EPs have demonstrated great ability of manipulating eigenstates in classical systems, but the effects and applications of EPs in quantum domain remain largely unexplored. Here we show that EPs can significantly enhance the quantum coherence of atom-cavity interaction in an extended configuration of microcavity featuring chiral EPs, where the introduction of an auxiliary lossy cavity offers multiple new degrees of freedom to tailor the photonic density of states (PhDOS) of the cavities. We find from PhDOS that the proposed model can simultaneously reduce the effective linewidth of cavities and enhance the effective coupling strength of atom-cavity interaction by over one order of magnitude, leading to the prominent Rabi oscillations and improved lifetime of dressed states even the total system dissipation is increased. Our proposal thus holds great promise for building highperformance quantum devices without demanding requirement of strong atom-cavity interaction and enriches the understanding of EPs in manipulating quantum states.
Atom-photon dressed states are a basic concept of quantum optics. Here, we demonstrate that the non-Hermiticity of an open cavity can be harnessed to form the dressed bound states (DBSs) and identify two types of DBSs, the vacancylike DBS and Friedrich-Wintgen DBS, in a microring resonator operating at a chiral exceptional point. With the analytical DBS conditions, we show that the vacancylike DBS occurs when an atom couples to the standing-wave mode that is a node of the photonic wave function and characterized by null spectral density at cavity resonance. However, the Friedrich-Wintgen DBS can be accessed by continuously tuning the system parameters, such as the atom-photon detuning, and evidenced by a vanishing Rabi peak in the emission spectrum, an unusual feature in the strong-coupling anticrossing. We also demonstrate the quantum-optics applications of the proposed DBSs. Our work exhibits quantum state control through non-Hermiticity of open quantum system and presents a clear physical picture of DBSs at chiral exceptional points, which holds great potential for building high-performance quantum devices for sensing, photon storage, and nonclassical light generation.
Spontaneous emission of a quantum emitter, such as an excited atom, is a fundamental process in quantum electrodynamics (QED), typically associated with exponential decay to the ground state accompanied by irreversible photon emission. This simple Markovian picture, however, is profoundly modified in the presence of time-delayed feedback, structured continua, or cooperative emission, as occurs when an emitter radiates in front of a mirror, when several emitters radiate collectively, or in the case of a giant atom. In such regimes, strong non-Markovian dynamics arise from photon reabsorption and interference effects, leading to pronounced deviations from exponential decay. Here we demonstrate the emergence of exceptional points (EPs) in these highly non-Markovian waveguide-QED environments, i.e., non-Markovian EPs. These EPs appear directly in the relaxation dynamics as sharp transitions to oscillatory behavior, manifested by the appearance of real zeros in the excited-state amplitude. We analyze in detail the spontaneous emission of giant atoms with two or more coupling points, highlighting the mechanisms leading to non-Markovian EPs, and show that similar phenomena arise in other waveguide-QED settings, such as the collective spontaneous emission of spatially separated point-like emitters. Our results reveal waveguide-QED systems as experimentally accessible platforms for realizing and exploring non-Markovian EP physics.
As branch-point singularities of non-Hermitian matrices, the exceptional points (EPs) exhibit unique spectral topology and criticality, with intriguing dynamic consequences in non-Hermitian settings. In quantum open systems, EPs also emerge in the Liouvillian spectrum, but their dynamic impact often pertains to the transient dynamics and is challenging to demonstrate. Here, using the flexible control afforded by single-photon interferometry, we study the chiral state transfer when the Liouvillian EP is parametrically encircled. Reconstructing the density-matrix evolution by experimentally simulating the quantum Langevin equation, we show that the chirality of the dynamics is only present within an intermediate encircling timescale and dictated by the landscape of the Liouvillian spectrum near the EP. However, the chirality disappears at long times as the system always relaxes to the steady state. We then demonstrate the power-law decay of the chirality in regard to the encircling time with a parameter-dependent exponent. Our experiment confirms the transient nature of chiral state transfer near a Liouvillian EP in quantum open systems, while our scheme paves the way for simulating general open-system dynamics using single photons.
Open photonic systems provide a versatile platform for non-Hermitian physics, enabling control over complex spectra, transport, and light-matter interactions. Exceptional points (EPs), at which eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce and the governing operator becomes defective, play a central role because they combine branch-point spectral topology, nonanalytic perturbative response, and controllable eigenstate conversion. This Review provides a unified framework for EP photonics by systematically distinguishing exceptional degeneracies according to the underlying operator, spectral variable, boundary conditions, and experimentally accessible observables. We discuss Hamiltonian EPs, absorbing EPs associated with scattering zeros, real-frequency scattering-matrix and Jones-matrix EPs, Bloch and Floquet EPs, and Liouvillian EPs in open quantum systems. We review their spectral topology, static and dynamical encircling, higher-order exceptional structures, and coexistence with bound states in the continuum, together with applications in sensing, lasing, coherent absorption, directional scattering, polarization and wavefront control, nonlinear optics, optical storage, nonreciprocal photonics, and quantum photonics. We also critically assess the current limitations, practical challenges, and future perspectives of EP-based photonic technologies, with particular attention to robustness, noise, scalability, and experimentally measurable performance.