We propose a scheme for realizing fractional quantum Hall states of light. In our scheme, photons of two polarizations are coupled to different atomic Rydberg states to form two flavors of Rydberg polaritons that behave as an effective spin. An array of optical cavity modes overlapping with the atomic cloud enables the realization of an effective spin-
1/2 lattice. We show that the dipolar interaction between such polaritons, inherited from the Rydberg states, can be exploited to create a flat, topological band for a single spin-flip excitation. At half filling, this gives rise to a photonic (or polaritonic) fractional Chern insulator---a lattice-based, fractional quantum Hall state of light.
The quest of utilizing neutral particles to simulate the behaviour of charged particles in a magnetic field makes the generation of artificial magnetic field of great interest. The previous and the only proposal for the production of synthetic magnetic field for the dark state polaritons in electromagnetically induced transparency invokes the mechanical rotation of a sample. Here, we put forward an optical scheme to generate effective gauge potentials for stationary-light polaritons. 5To demonstrate the capabilities of our approach, we present recipes for having dark state polaritons in degenerate Landau levels and in driven quantum harmonic oscillator. Our scheme paves a novel way towards the investigation of the bosonic analogue of the fractional quantum Hall effect by electromagnetically induced transparency.
Interacting Rydberg excitations in cold atomic ensembles can exhibit large quantum nonlinearities that enable engineering of strong interactions between individual photons. Consequently, Rydberg ensembles are a promising platform for quantum information applications and the study of more fundamental physics of few- and many-body phenomena with interacting photons. This thesis presents a series of experiments that study and exploit different regimes of Rydberg-mediated interactions. We report the realization of an efficient on-demand single-photon source. The strong long-range Rydberg interactions allow the excitation of only a single collective Rydberg state within the entire atomic medium. The collective excitation can be subsequently retrieved as a single-photon. We use this scheme to generate highly pure and highly indistinguishable photons, which are suitable for scalable quantum information applications. These photons can be compatible with other atomic systems due to their narrow bandwidth, which makes building practical hybrid quantum systems feasible. Here, we demonstrate high visibility two-photon quantum interference between our Rydberg-produced photons, and photons emitted by a remote single-trapped ion. We also study Rydberg atoms under electromagnetically induced transparency conditions, where coherent superpostions of photons and Rydberg excitations propagate through the atomic medium as lossless dark-state polaritons. In the experiment, we use the external control fields to tune the interactions to a many-body regime where we can observe resonant scattering of dark-state polaritons to lossy channels. We show that the enhanced scattering process arises as a pure three-body effect.