Bound states in N-body quantum systems

Yashar Komijani, Piers Coleman

Platter, L., H.‐W. Hammer, Ulf-G. Meißner

We consider the nonrelativistic four-boson system in two dimensions interacting via a short-range attractive potential. For a weakly attractive potential with one shallow two-body bound state with binding energy B-2, the binding energies B-N of shallow N-body bound states are universal and thus do not depend on the details of the interaction potential. We compute the four-body binding energies in an effective quantum mechanics approach. There are exactly two bound states: the ground state with B-4((0)) = 197.33(1)B-2 and one excited state with B-4((1)) = 25.5 (1)B-2. We compare our results to recent predictions for N-body bound states with large N much greater than 1.

Jan Dereziński, Christian Gérard

Sahand Mahmoodian, Giuseppe Calajò, Darrick E. Chang +2 more

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.

Marcel Griesemer

Sahand Mahmoodian, Calajó, Guiseppe, Darrick E. Chang +2 more

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 well-defined photon number n and propagate through the system with a group delay scaling as 1/n2. 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. © 2020 authors.