Chiral quantum emitters interact with light only in one propagation direction, allowing them to be linked into cascaded systems in which photons mediate ordered, long-range interactions. Such systems are predicted to host novel regimes of many-body physics of light and matter. Exploring these regimes requires arrays of identical quantum emitters with directional, low-loss coupling to guided photons, a combination that has thus far remained experimentally out of reach. Here we realize a cascaded network of superconducting qubits using an architecture that overcomes these bottlenecks. We implement a four-qubit chain spanning two modules, with separations ranging from millimeters to half a meter, and exploit the shared waveguide as a dissipative resource to stabilize reconfigurable entanglement, reaching a genuinely multipartite regime unavailable in reciprocal baths. By scattering weak pulses off the chain, we observe photons sorted in time by photon number, a signature of the strong photon-photon interactions mediated by the emitters. Together, these results provide experimental access to many-body light-matter regimes that are beyond the reach of reciprocal systems.
Chiral quantum emitters interact with light only in one propagation direction, allowing them to be linked into cascaded systems in which photons mediate ordered, long-range interactions. Such systems are predicted to host novel regimes of many-body physics of light and matter. Exploring these regimes requires arrays of identical quantum emitters with directional, low-loss coupling to guided photons, a combination that has thus far remained experimentally out of reach. Here we realize a cascaded network of superconducting qubits using an architecture that overcomes these bottlenecks. We implement a four-qubit chain spanning two modules, with separations ranging from millimeters to half a meter, and exploit the shared waveguide as a dissipative resource to stabilize reconfigurable entanglement, reaching a genuinely multipartite regime unavailable in reciprocal baths. By scattering weak pulses off the chain, we observe photons sorted in time by photon number, a signature of the strong photon-photon interactions mediated by the emitters. Together, these results provide experimental access to many-body light-matter regimes that are beyond the reach of reciprocal systems.
Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by “correlated flying qubits”, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms. Chiral quantum optics is a prerequisite for communication protocols in quantum networks, but current methods are limited to the single-photon regime. The authors demonstrate that multiple giant emitters coupled to a nonlinear waveguide enable tunable multiphoton directional emission via interference, establishing a configurable building block for multiphoton cascaded quantum networks.
We theoretically study the few-and many-body dynamics of photons in chiral waveguides.In particular, we examine pulse propagation through an ensemble of N two-level systems chirally coupled to a waveguide.We show that the system supports correlated multiphoton bound states, which have a welldefined photon number n and propagate through the system with a group delay scaling as 1=n 2 .This has the interesting consequence that, during propagation, an incident coherent-state pulse breaks up into different bound-state components that can become spatially separated at the output in a sufficiently long system.For sufficiently many photons and sufficiently short systems, we show that linear combinations of n-body bound states recover the well-known phenomenon of mean-field solitons in self-induced transparency.Our work thus covers the entire spectrum from few-photon quantum propagation, to genuine quantum many-body (atom and photon) phenomena, and ultimately the quantum-to-classical transition.Finally, we demonstrate that the bound states can undergo elastic scattering with additional photons.Together, our results demonstrate that photon bound states are truly distinct physical objects emerging from the most elementary light-matter interaction between photons and two-level emitters.Our work opens the door to studying quantum many-body physics and soliton physics with photons in chiral waveguide QED.
Atom arrays are a new type of quantum light-matter interface.Here we propose to employ one-dimensional ordered arrays as atomic waveguides.These arrays support optical guided modes that do not decay into free space.We show that these modes can be harnessed to mediate tunable, long-range interactions between additional "impurity qubits" coupled to the chain, without need for photonic structures.The efficient coupling between qubits and atomic waveguides enables the realization of tunable qubit-qubit interactions, which can be short or long range, dissipative or coherent, as well as chiral.Moreover, owing to the two-level nature of atoms, these waveguides are intrinsically quantum.In contrast to classical waveguides, where photons do not interact with each other, atomic waveguides display strong nonlinearities, which create a tunable dissipative channel for qubit-qubit interactions, and opens the door to the exploration of many-body physics between guided photons.This physics is universal as it only relies on photon interference and can also be observed with other types of quantum emitters, such as those in molecular or solid-state systems.
When multiple quantum emitters couple to a common electromagnetic environment, interference in their collective radiative dynamics gives rise to superradiance and subradiance. In regimes where coherent interactions and collective dissipation compete, the microscopic many-body dynamics and quantum correlations among the emitters that underlie superradiance and subradiance are theoretically challenging and remain experimentally elusive, even though collective emission has been observed in many physical systems. Here, we realize a superconducting qubit array coupled to a common microwave waveguide that mediates collective dissipation, with simultaneous access to coherent interactions and microscopic measurements of many-body dynamics. Engineered qubit-waveguide couplings with tunable amplitude and phase enable control of collective interference and the resulting super- and subradiant states. Leveraging site-resolved control and readout, we directly observe the microscopic decay dynamics of multi-qubit states across different excitation manifolds and track the evolution of populations and tunable quantum correlations. We reveal collective decay in regimes beyond the ideal Dicke model, where strong qubit-qubit interactions stabilize superradiance and subradiance against local dephasing and reshape decay pathways through spatially and spectrally structured many-body eigenstates. Our results establish a flexible platform for exploring collective phenomena in many-body quantum optics and driven-dissipative approaches to robust quantum information processing.
Controlling light photon-by-photon is central to quantum optics. At a fundamental level, photon interactions are mediated by their coupling to atoms, and ultimate control requires deterministic light-matter interfacing of single photons to single atoms. Extending this paradigm to radiatively couple multiple individual atoms in a deterministic and scalable manner opens the arena of many-body quantum optics. Here, we realize such a setting by coherently coupling solid-state artificial atoms to a nanophotonic waveguide and demonstrate higher-order photon correlations that are controlled by the number of quantum emitters. We study the scaling of nonlinear photonic transport induced by emitter-photon scattering and demonstrate that adding a quantum emitter generates higher-order photon correlations. Specifically, we experimentally observe genuine three-photon correlations from a pair of collectively coupled emitters, while contributions from lower photon numbers are suppressed. In addition, we scale to three resonant quantum emitters coupled to the waveguide. These advancements demonstrate the onset of many-body quantum optics in waveguide quantum electrodynamics, enabling new photonic quantum simulators, the creation of many-body entangled states, and the exploration of novel quantum phase transitions.