Quantum Crystals and Laughlin Droplets of Cavity Rydberg Polaritons

Abstract

Synthetic quantum materials offer an exciting opportunity to explore quantum many-body physics and novel states of matter under controlled conditions. In particular, they provide an avenue to exchange the short length scales and large energy scales of the solid state for an engineered system with better control over the system Hamiltonian, more accurate state preparation, and higher fidelity state readout. Here we propose a unique platform to study quantum phases of strongly interacting photons. We introduce ideas for controlling the dynamics of individual photons by manipulating the geometry of a multimode optical cavity, and combine them with recently established techniques to mediate strong interactions between photons using Rydberg atoms. We demonstrate that this approach gives rise to crystalline- and fractional quantum Hall- states of light, opening the door to studies of strongly correlated quantum many-body physics in a photonic material.

arXiv comment13 pages, 5 figures

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Topological Photonics
• Topological Photonics
• Strongly interacting photons in one-dimensional continuum
• Synthetic Landau levels for photons
• Measurement of many-body chaos using a quantum clock
• Observation of Cavity Rydberg Polaritons
• Effective Field Theory for Rydberg Polaritons
• Three-body interaction of Rydberg slow light polaritons
• Efimov States of Strongly Interacting Photons
• Engineering Photonic Floquet Hamiltonians through Fabry Pérot Resonators
• Generation and spectroscopic signatures of a fractional quantum Hall liquid of photons in an incoherently pumped optical cavity
• Hamiltonian Tomography of Photonic Lattices
• Quantum theory of Kerr nonlinearity with Rydberg slow light polaritons
• Coherent generation of photonic fractional quantum Hall states in a cavity and the search for anyonic quasiparticles
• Few-body quantum physics with strongly interacting Rydberg polaritons
• Exotic photonic molecules via Lennard-Jones-like potentials
• Resonant enhancement of three-body loss between strongly interacting photons