Slow-light polaritons in Rydberg gases

Krzysztof Jachymski, Przemysław Bienias, Hans Peter Büchler

Przemysław Bienias, Hans Peter Büchler

We study the propagation of Rydberg slow light polaritons through an atomic medium in the regime where the dispersion relation for the polaritons is well described by the slow light velocity alone. In this regime, the quantum many-body problem can be solved analytically for arbitrary shape of the atomic cloud. We demonstrate the connection of Rydberg polaritons to the behavior of a conventional Kerr nonlinearity for weak interactions and determine the leading quantum corrections for increasing interactions. We propose an experimental setup which allows one to measure the effective two-body interaction potential between Rydberg polaritons as well as higher-body interactions. Our work shows that the locality and causality based no-go theorems for quantum gates do not apply to setups based on Rydberg polaritons.

Johannes Otterbach, Alexey Vyacheslavovich Gorshkov, Thomas Pohl +2 more

Alexandros Georgakopoulos, Ningyuan Jia, Albert Ryou +5 more

Krzysztof Jachymski, Przemysław Bienias, Hans Peter Büchler

We study a system of three photons in an atomic medium coupled to Rydberg states near the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. Based on the analytical analysis of the microscopic set of equations in the far-detuned regime, the effective three-body interaction for these Rydberg polaritons is derived. For slow light polaritons, we find a strong three-body repulsion with the remarkable property that three polaritons can become essentially noninteracting at short distances. This analysis allows us to derive the influence of the three-body repulsion on bound states and correlation functions of photons propagating through a one-dimensional atomic cloud.

Alexander Edelman, P. B. Littlewood