Novel frontier in quantum metamaterials (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Metamaterials are artificial materials with exotic physical, chemical and optical properties not found in natural materials. In the past decade they have attracted monumental attention from the scientific community owing to their applications ranging from physics to engineering. However, the conventional solid-state metamaterial platforms suffer from inevitable optical loss, defects which severely curtain their application at few-photon level. The quest for quantum optical applications with metamaterial-based technologies has stimulated researchers to engineer novel lossless materials and construct new platforms. Recently, by integrating two important and timely realms of science − trapped atom physics and metamaterials −, we proposed and theoretically demonstrated a topologically reconfigurable and lossless quantum metamaterial. The atomic lattice quantum metamaterial is immune to aforementioned critical challenges and can be employed at a single-photon level. Moreover, in stark contrast to conventional solid-state platforms, optical lattices provide the necessary freedom to precisely localize (within few nanometer of uncertainty) a probe atom, inside the atomic lattice quantum metamaterial to harness its exotic optical properties. In addition to its aforementioned novel characteristics, our atomic lattice quantum metamaterial offers a unique degree of freedom, namely all-optical control on ultrafast time scales over the photonic topological transition of isofrequency contours using weak fields, not possible with previous solid-state platforms. In this work, we leverage the tools, techniques, scientific advances in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics, integrated with the concepts used in metamaterials to propose and theoretically demonstrate a novel platform towards quantum metamaterial with novel functionalities by bringing together the best of two worlds.