We investigate the driven-dissipative dynamics of multilevel atomic arrays interacting via dipolar interactions at subwavelength spacings. Unlike two-level atoms in the weakly excited regime, multilevel atoms can become strongly entangled. The entanglement manifests as the growth of spin waves in the ground-state manifold and survives after turning off the drive. We propose the 2.9 μm transition between ^{3}P_{2}↔^{3}D_{3} in ^{88}Sr with 389 nm trapping light as a platform to test our predictions and explore many-body physics with light-matter interactions.
We investigate the driven-dissipative dynamics of multilevel atomic arrays interacting via dipolar interactions at subwavelength spacings. Unlike two-level atoms in the weakly excited regime, multilevel atoms can become strongly entangled. The entanglement manifests as the growth of spin waves in the ground-state manifold and survives after turning off the drive. We propose the 2.9 μm transition between ^{3}P_{2}↔^{3}D_{3} in ^{88}Sr with 389 nm trapping light as a platform to test our predictions and explore many-body physics with light-matter interactions.
We study an array of two-level systems arranged on a lattice and illuminated by an external plane wave which drives a dipolar transition between the two energy levels. In this setup, the two-level systems are coupled by dipolar interactions and subject to nonlocal dissipation, and so behave as an open many-body quantum system. We investigate the long-time dynamics of the system at the mean-field level and use this to determine a phase diagram as a function of external drive and detuning. We find a multitude of phases including antiferromagnetism, spin density waves, oscillations, and phase bistabilities. We investigate these phases in more detail and explain how nonlocal dissipation plays a role in the long-time dynamics. Furthermore, we discuss what features would survive in the full quantum description.
We utilize multilevel atoms trapped in a driven resonant optical cavity to produce scalable multimode squeezed states for quantum sensing and metrology. While superradiance or collective dissipative emission by itself has been typically a detrimental effect for entanglement generation in optical cavities, in the presence of additional drives it can also be used as an entanglement resource. In a recent work [B. Sundar, D. Barberena, A. M. Rey, and A. Pi\~neiro Orioli, companion paper, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 033601 (2024)], we described a protocol for the dissipative generation of two-mode squeezing in the dark state of a six-level system with only one relevant polarization. There we showed that up to two quadratures can be squeezed. Here, we develop a generalized analytic treatment to calculate the squeezing in any multilevel system where atoms can collectively decay by emitting light into two polarization modes in a cavity. We show that in this more general system up to four spin squeezed quadratures can be obtained. We study how finite-size effects constrain the reachable squeezing, and analytically compute the scaling with N. Our findings are readily testable in current optical cavity experiments with alkaline-earth-like atoms.
When quantum emitters couple indistinguishably to light, they can synchronize into a collective light matter system with radiative properties profoundly different from those of independent particles. To date, the resulting collective effects have largely been confined to point like or homogeneous ensembles. Here, we open access to a qualitatively new collective regime by realizing geometrically ordered, spatially extended atom arrays with subwavelength spacing. This establishes a fundamentally new platform in which collective emission is no longer confined to a single Dicke mode but instead emerges from an ordered network of photon mediated interactions. We find that 2D atom arrays undergo strong super and subradiant emission. Despite subwavelength spacing, we achieve site resolved imaging and directly observe the buildup of spatial correlations, demonstrating the transformation of cooperative decay into a strongly correlated many-body process. We observe extensive scaling of superradiance, uncover superradiant revivals, and reveal the ferromagnetic nature of superradiance and the antiferromagnetic nature of subradiance. Our results realize a novel programmable platform for exploring and utilizing dissipative many-body quantum physics, opening new possibilities for photon capture, storage, and atom photon entanglement.
Dissipative light-matter systems can display emergent collective behavior. Here, we report a Z 2 -symmetry-breaking phase transition in a system of multilevel Rb 87 atoms strongly coupled to a weakly driven two-mode optical cavity. In the symmetry-broken phase, nonergodic dynamics manifests in the emergence of multiple stationary states with disjoint basins of attraction. This feature enables the amplification of a small atomic population imbalance into a characteristic macroscopic cavity transmission signal. Our experiment does not only showcase strongly dissipative atom-cavity systems as platforms for probing nontrivial collective many-body phenomena, but also highlights their potential for hosting technological applications in the context of sensing, density classification, and pattern retrieval dynamics within associative memories. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
In inverted atomic ensembles, photon-mediated interactions give rise to Dicke superradiance, a form of many-body decay that results in a rapid release of energy as a photon burst. While originally studied in pointlike ensembles, this phenomenon persists in extended ordered systems if the interparticle distance is below a certain bound. Here, we investigate Dicke superradiance in a realistic experimental setting using ordered arrays of alkaline-earth(-like) atoms, such as strontium and ytterbium. Such atoms offer exciting new opportunities for light-matter interactions, as their internal structure allows for trapping at short interatomic distances compared to their long-wavelength transitions, providing the potential for collectively enhanced dissipative interactions. Despite their intricate electronic structure, we show that two-dimensional arrays of these atomic species should exhibit many-body superradiance for achievable lattice constants. Moreover, superradiance effectively “closes” transitions, such that multilevel atoms become more two-level like. This occurs because the avalanchelike decay funnels the emission of most photons into the dominant transition, overcoming the single-atom decay ratios dictated by their fine structure and Zeeman branching. Our work represents an important step in harnessing alkaline-earth atoms as quantum optical sources and as platforms to explore many-body dissipative dynamics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Abstract The quantum Rabi model, which describes the interaction between a simplified atom and a mode of the electromagnetic field, is a cornerstone of modern quantum optics. One of the key assumptions of the model is that the ‘atom’ is a perfect two-level system. We explore what happens when one generalises the atom to a multilevel system, with m ground and n excited states coupled to the same field. We focus on the case where the excited and ground states form distinct, well-separated, manifolds of near-degenerate levels (so that the spacing between the excited states on a given manifold is much less than the average spacing between the manifolds) and consider either uniform or random couplings between the individual ground and excited levels. We find that the system reduces approximately to a direct sum of Rabi models with a range of different couplings. Importantly, the strongest coupling is enhanced in a way that depends on the number of levels, for the simple case where n = m, the coupling scales with n for uniform couplings and 2 n for random couplings (in the limit of large n). Our work thus suggests that multilevel Rabi systems could provide an attractive alternative route to accessing regimes of very strong coupling in light-matter systems.