The ability to harness the ubiquitous dissipation in realistic quantum systems holds great promise for developing advanced quantum technologies. In particular, the presence of dissipation violates the fundamental premise of Hermiticity and results in the non-Hermitian singularities associated with coalesced eigenstates in parameter space known as exceptional points (EPs), providing a new strategy to manipulate quantum states in both dynamical evolution and stationary limit. In this work, we show that for a microcavity supporting chiral EPs, light-matter interaction between the cavity photons and a quantum emitter can be flexibly switched from coherent to fully dissipative by tuning the phase factor of a complex coupling rate, an additional degree of freedom offered by the chiral EPs of a microcavity. The tunable coherent and dissipative light-matter interactions are evidenced by the distinguishing quantum dynamics and optical spectra, where the dispersion of a coupled quantum system changes from level repulsion to level attraction. While dissipation is generally considered fatal for quantum effects and should be suppressed, here we find that the EP-enabled dissipative light-matter interaction shows a unique advantage in achieving high-efficiency single-photon emission in a weak-coupling regime through the non-Hermitian photon blockade, which originates from the anharmonicity in the losses instead of in the eigenenergy levels for the conventional photon blockade (CPB). A giant enhancement of more than 5 orders of magnitude is found for both photon correlations and intensity compared to that of CPB in coherent light-matter interaction. We expect our work to enrich the understanding of light-matter interaction in open photonic resonators and provide insight into the manipulation of quantum states and quantum correlations in a wide variety of quantum systems by utilizing the non-Hermicity of electromagnetic environments.
The ability to harness the ubiquitous dissipation in realistic quantum systems holds great promise for developing advanced quantum technologies. In particular, the presence of dissipation violates the fundamental premise of Hermiticity and results in the non-Hermitian singularities associated with coalesced eigenstates in parameter space known as exceptional points (EPs), providing a new strategy to manipulate quantum states in both dynamical evolution and stationary limit. In this work, we show that for a microcavity supporting chiral EPs, light-matter interaction between the cavity photons and a quantum emitter can be flexibly switched from coherent to fully dissipative by tuning the phase factor of a complex coupling rate, an additional degree of freedom offered by the chiral EPs of a microcavity. The tunable coherent and dissipative light-matter interactions are evidenced by the distinguishing quantum dynamics and optical spectra, where the dispersion of a coupled quantum system changes from level repulsion to level attraction. While dissipation is generally considered fatal for quantum effects and should be suppressed, here we find that the EP-enabled dissipative light-matter interaction shows a unique advantage in achieving high-efficiency single-photon emission in a weak-coupling regime through the non-Hermitian photon blockade, which originates from the anharmonicity in the losses instead of in the eigenenergy levels for the conventional photon blockade (CPB). A giant enhancement of more than 5 orders of magnitude is found for both photon correlations and intensity compared to that of CPB in coherent light-matter interaction. We expect our work to enrich the understanding of light-matter interaction in open photonic resonators and provide insight into the manipulation of quantum states and quantum correlations in a wide variety of quantum systems by utilizing the non-Hermicity of electromagnetic environments.
Exceptional points (EPs) are the non-Hermitian singularities in the parameters space of open physical systems, where the eigenenergies and associated eigenstates coalesce. EPs have demonstrated great ability of manipulating eigenstates in classical systems, but the effects and applications of EPs in quantum domain remain largely unexplored. Here we show that EPs can significantly enhance the quantum coherence of atom-cavity interaction in an extended configuration of microcavity featuring chiral EPs, where the introduction of an auxiliary lossy cavity offers multiple new degrees of freedom to tailor the photonic density of states (PhDOS) of the cavities. We find from PhDOS that the proposed model can simultaneously reduce the effective linewidth of cavities and enhance the effective coupling strength of atom-cavity interaction by over one order of magnitude, leading to the prominent Rabi oscillations and improved lifetime of dressed states even the total system dissipation is increased. Our proposal thus holds great promise for building highperformance quantum devices without demanding requirement of strong atom-cavity interaction and enriches the understanding of EPs in manipulating quantum states.
An open quantum system operated at the spectral singularities where dimensionality reduces, known as exceptional points (EPs), demonstrates distinguishing behavior from the Hermitian counterpart. Here, we present an analytical description of local density of states (LDOS) for microcavity featuring chiral EPs, and unveil the anomalous spontaneous emission dynamics from a quantum emitter (QE) due to the non-Lorentzian response of EPs. Specifically, we reveal that a squared Lorentzian term of LDOS contributed by chiral EPs can destructively interfere with the linear Lorentzian profile, resulting in the null Purcell enhancement to a QE with special transition frequency, which we call EP induced transparency. While for the case of constructive interference, the squared Lorentzian term can narrow the linewidth of Rabi splitting even below that of bare components, and thus significantly suppresses the decay of Rabi oscillation. Interestingly, we further find that an open microcavity with chiral EPs supports atom-photon bound states for population trapping and decay suppression in long-time dynamics. As applications, we demonstrate the advantages of microcavity operated at chiral EPs in achieving high-fidelity entanglement generation and high-efficiency single-photon generation. Our work unveils the exotic cavity quantum electrodynamics unique to chiral EPs, which opens the door for controlling light-matter interaction at the quantum level through non-Hermiticity, and holds great potential in building high-performance quantum-optics devices.
Controlling atom–photon interactions in engineered environments is central to quantum optics and emerging quantum technologies. Non-Hermitian (NH) photonic baths, where dissipation fundamentally reshapes spectral and dynamical properties, provide versatile platforms for such control. Here, we investigate the relaxation dynamics of a single two-level quantum emitter coupled to the edge of a semi-infinite dissipative bosonic lattice with uniform loss. Despite the simplicity of this bath, we uncover rich dynamical phase transitions, i.e., qualitative changes in spontaneous-emission decay as system parameters are varied. In particular, we establish the existence of an optimal dissipative environment for accelerated spontaneous emission. The phase transitions are traced to spectral restructuring of the resolvent, in some cases governed by the coalescence of resonance states on the second Riemann sheet. We identify these coalescences as virtual exceptional points (EPs) of resonance origin, providing a conceptual bridge with EP physics while highlighting distinctive features of infinite-dimensional NH systems. More broadly, our results illustrate how the specific nature of dissipation—whether uniform losses, staggered losses, or dephasing—can profoundly impact emitter relaxation, pointing to dissipation engineering as a versatile tool for quantum technologies.
Dissipative light-matter coupling plays a vital role in non-Hermitian physics, but it remains largely unexplored in waveguide QED systems. In this work, we find that by employing pseudo-Hermitian symmetry rather than anti- PT symmetry, the concept of dissipative coupling could be generalized and applied to the field of waveguide QED. This leads to a series of intriguing results, such as spontaneous breaking of pseudo-Hermitian symmetry across the exceptional points (EPs), level attraction between the bound states, and critical transition across the EPs for the population of quantum emitters in the bound state. Thanks to the tunability of photonic bands in crystal waveguides, we also demonstrate that dissipative light-matter coupling leads to the emergence of nonstandard third-order exceptional points with chiral spatial profiles in a topological waveguide QED system. This work provides a promising paradigm for studying non-Hermitian quantum phenomena in waveguide QED systems.
Open photonic systems provide a versatile platform for non-Hermitian physics, enabling control over complex spectra, transport, and light-matter interactions. Exceptional points (EPs), at which eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce and the governing operator becomes defective, play a central role because they combine branch-point spectral topology, nonanalytic perturbative response, and controllable eigenstate conversion. This Review provides a unified framework for EP photonics by systematically distinguishing exceptional degeneracies according to the underlying operator, spectral variable, boundary conditions, and experimentally accessible observables. We discuss Hamiltonian EPs, absorbing EPs associated with scattering zeros, real-frequency scattering-matrix and Jones-matrix EPs, Bloch and Floquet EPs, and Liouvillian EPs in open quantum systems. We review their spectral topology, static and dynamical encircling, higher-order exceptional structures, and coexistence with bound states in the continuum, together with applications in sensing, lasing, coherent absorption, directional scattering, polarization and wavefront control, nonlinear optics, optical storage, nonreciprocal photonics, and quantum photonics. We also critically assess the current limitations, practical challenges, and future perspectives of EP-based photonic technologies, with particular attention to robustness, noise, scalability, and experimentally measurable performance.
We consider the scenario of an emitter embedded in a nonideal cavity. Using an input-output approach to describe the open system, we show that an effective dissipative coupling between the emitter and the cavity can emerge because of their interaction with a common photonic environment. The underlying mechanism is independent of the nature of the emitter and exists even at zero temperature; hence our results provide a pathway for accessing a range of non-Hermitian phenomena in a variety of light-matter coupled systems. In particular, we show that the effective dissipative coupling can lead to the phenomenon of level attraction between the emitter and cavity mode when the radiative decay rates exceed the conventional Rabi coupling. Our model thus provides a possible explanation for the anomalous dispersions and negative mass observed in recent photoluminescence measurements in semiconductor microcavities. Finally, we show that our effective non-Hermitian system can produce hybrid light-matter exceptional points and bound states in the continuum.