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Science

Harnessing the dark to store light

Ian S. Osborne

Published Jun 3, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum Optics An excited atom will naturally decay to the ground state, with the exciting and emitted photons forming the basis for the optical protocols in quantum communication and computation. Within an ensemble of atoms, this emission process can proceed constructively, resulting in faster ensemble decay in an effect known as superradiance. In contrast to the superradiant process, Ferioli et al. report subradiance in an ensemble of excited rubidium atoms, where collective behavior between the decaying atoms proceeds destructively, thereby extending the lifetime of the excited atom ensemble in what can be described as a dark state. Engineering such dark states could provide a route to storing light. The reduced linewidth could also be useful in metrology applications. Phys. Rev. X 11 , 021031 (2021).

DOI
10.1126/science.372.6546.1052-f

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Quantum Optics
An excited atom will naturally decay to the ground state, with the exciting and emitted photons forming the basis for the optical protocols in quantum communication and computation. Within an ensemble of atoms, this emission process can proceed constructively, resulting in faster ensemble decay in an effect known as superradiance. In contrast to the superradiant process, Ferioli et al. report subradiance in an ensemble of excited rubidium atoms, where collective behavior between the decaying atoms proceeds destructively, thereby extending the lifetime of the excited atom ensemble in what can be described as a dark state. Engineering such dark states could provide a route to storing light. The reduced linewidth could also be useful in metrology applications.
Phys. Rev. X 11 , 021031 (2021).
The interaction between light and matter has captivated physicists for centuries, from early studies of vision and refraction in ancient Greece to the development of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics in the past century. While the response of a single quantum emitter to light is well understood, the radiative properties of an ensemble of closely spaced emitters are far more intricate. Coupling to a shared electromagnetic environment induces coherent and dissipative interactions between emitters, giving rise to a collective response that cannot be captured by treating them independently. In the regime of few excitations, the system hosts delocalized subradiant states, that is, coherent superpositions that are largely decoupled from the electromagnetic field and thus decay at suppressed rates. While this weak coupling makes subradiant states attractive for quantum technologies, it also renders them difficult to manipulate. At higher excitation densities, the intrinsic nonlinearity of emitters and the exponential growth of the Hilbert space make theoretical and numerical descriptions of the system and its dynamics increasingly challenging. This thesis explores two fundamental questions: How can subradiant and dark states be selectively accessed and harnessed for practical applications in quantum technologies? And how can interacting ensembles of quantum emitters be efficiently simulated to uncover their many-body physics? The first part of the thesis develops protocols for controlling and addressing dark states in free-space and waveguide-coupled atomic arrays, demonstrating their utility in quantum storage and the deterministic generation of entangled photonic states. Incorporating atomic motion, we further show that collective subradiant states can enhance cooling in dense atomic arrays, offering new avenues for controlling motional dynamics. In the second part, we introduce cumulant expansions of the equations of motion as a powerful tool to analytically and numerically investigate collective decay in the many-body regime. We first examine the collective decay of fully excited atomic arrays in free space, characterizing the onset and scaling of the superradiant burst across different geometries. In collaboration with experiments on ultracold erbium atoms in optical lattices, we provide the first direct observations of many-body collective effects in free-space ordered arrays, including early-time superradiant bursts, late-time subradiant tails, and the emergence of atomic correlations throughout the dynamics. Finally, we theoretically and numerically explore the transient formation of multi-excitation subradiant states, and demonstrate how the existence of multiple dissipation channels suppresses steady-state superradiance in extended arrays.
Collectivity in ensembles of atoms gives rise to effects like super- and subradiance. While superradiance is well studied and experimentally accessible, subradiance remains elusive since it is difficult to track experimentally as well as theoretically. Here we present a new type of phase transition in the resonantly driven, open Dicke model that leads to a deterministic generation of subradiant states. At the transition the system switches from a predominantly superradiant to a predominantly subradiant state. Counterintuitively, the cavity decay is the crucial parameter for subradiant state generation and not the individualizing process of spontaneous decay. The observed effect is thus a cavity assisted generation of subradiant quantum coherences. Clear experimental signatures for the effect are presented and entanglement properties are discussed. Letting the system relax into the ground state generates a cascade of dark Dicke states, with dark state populations up to unity. Furthermore we introduce a collectivity measure that allows to quantify collective behaviour.
Superradiance, characterized by the collective, coherent emission of light from an excited ensemble of emitters, generates photonic signals on timescales faster than the natural lifetime of an individual atom. The rapid exchange of coherence between atomic emitters and photonic fields in the superradiant regime enables a fast, broadband quantum memory. We demonstrate this superradiance memory mechanism in an ensemble of cold rubidium atoms and verify that this protocol is suitable for pulses on timescales shorter than the atoms' natural lifetime. Our simulations show that the superradiance memory protocol yields the highest bandwidth storage among protocols in the same system. These high-bandwidth quantum memories provide unique opportunities for fast processing of optical and microwave photonic signals, with applications in large-scale quantum communication and quantum computing technologies.
Coherent control of collective spontaneous emission in an extended atomic ensemble resonantly interacting with single-photon wave packets is analyzed. A scheme for coherent manipulation of collective atomic states is developed such that superradiant states of the atomic system can be converted into subradiant ones and vice versa. Possible applications of such a scheme for optical quantum-state storage and single-photon wave packet shaping are discussed. It is shown that also in the absence of inhomogeneous broadening of the resonant line, single-photon wave packets with arbitrary pulse shape may be recorded as a subradiant state and reconstructed even although the duration of the wave packets is larger than the superradiant lifetime. Specifically the applicability for storing time-bin qubits, which are used in quantum cryptography, is analyzed.
Spontaneous emission of atoms in free space is modified by the presence of other atoms in close vicinity inducing collective super- and subradiance. For two nearby atoms with a single decay channel the entangled antisymmetric superposition state of the two single excited states will not decay spontaneously. No such excited two-atom dark state exists, if the excited state has two independent optical decay channels of different frequencies or polarizations. However, we show that for an excited atomic state with N-1 independent spontaneous decay channels one can find a highly entangled N-particle dark state, which completely decouples from the vacuum radiation field. It does not decay spontaneously, nor will it absorb resonant laser light. Mathematically, we see that this state is the only such state orthogonal to the subspace spanned by the atomic ground states. Moreover, by means of generic numerical examples we demonstrate that the subradiant behavior largely survives at finite atomic distances including dipole-dipole interactions.
We generalize the theoretical modeling of collective atomic super- and subradiance to the multilevel case including spontaneous emission from several excited states towards a common ground state. We show that in a closely packed ensemble of N atoms with N –1 distinct excited states each, one can find a new class of non-radiating dark states, which allows for long-term storage of N –1 photonic excitations. Via dipole-dipole coupling only a single atom in the ground state is sufficient in order to suppress the decay of all N –1 other atoms. By means of some generic geometric configurations, like a triangle of V-type atoms or a chain of atoms with a transition, we study such subradiance including dipole-dipole interactions and show that even at finite distances long lifetimes can be observed. While generally hard to prepare deterministically, we identify various possibilities for a probabilistic preparation via a phase-controlled laser pump and decay.