Quantum Many-Body Physics with Photons
Ningyuan Jia
Understanding and manipulating quantum materials is a long-sought goal in both the condensed matter and cold atom communities. Photons have recently emerged as a good candidate for studying quantum many-body states due to their fast dynamics and convenient manipulation. Tremendous efforts have been made to engineer single particle Hamiltonian with non-trivial topology. Having individual photons to strongly collide with each other and form an entangled many-body state remained as a challenge in optical domain. ,In this thesis, I will first demonstrate how to engineer artificial magnetic field and non-trivial topology for microwave photons. In a classical lumped element circuit, we demonstrate the edge modes for microwave photons within the bulk band, and also show that these modes propagates with topological protection against the local lattice disorder. This work paves the way to synthesize correlated quantum materials in a lattice using microwave photons, combined with circuit QED technique. ,Recently, Rydberg-Rydberg interaction has been broadly used in cold atom experiment to generate long-range inter-particle coupling for quantum information processing and quantum material simulation. We combine this technique with cavity electromagnetically induced transparency and create a robust quasi-particle, cavity Rydberg polaritons, which harness the power from both cavity photons with exotic topology and Rydberg atoms with strong interactions. We first demonstrate the interaction in the single quanta level in a quantum dot with single cavity mode and further expand it into multi-mode regime with modulated atomic states.
Bulletin of the American Physical Society•Jan 1, 2018•0 citations