Atom-Photon Spin-Exchange Collisions Mediated by Rydberg Dressing

Abstract

We show that photons propagating through a Rydberg-dressed atomic ensemble can exchange its spin state with a single atom. Such a spin-exchange collision exhibits both dissipative and coherent features, depending on the interaction strength. For strong interaction, the collision dissipatively drives the system into an entangled dark state of the photon with an atom. In the weak interaction regime, the scattering coherently flips the spin of a single photon in the multi-photon input pulse, demonstrating a generic single-photon subtracting process. An analytic analysis of this process reveals a universal trade-off between efficiency and purity of the extracted photon, which applies to a wide class of single-photon subtractors. We show that such a trade-off can be optimized by adjusting the scattering rate under a novel phase-matching condition.

6+6 pages, 4+3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• A concise review of Rydberg atom based quantum computation and quantum simulation
• Deterministic Photon Sorting in Waveguide QED Systems
• High-fidelity interconversion between Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and $W$ states through Floquet-Lindblad engineering in Rydberg atom arrays
• Manipulating synthetic gauge fluxes via multicolor dressing of Rydberg-atom arrays
• Subtraction and Addition of Propagating Photons by Two-Level Emitters
• Two-Color Optical Nonlinearity in an Ultracold Rydberg Atom Gas Mixture
• Spin Squeezing with Arbitrary Quadratic Collective-Spin Interaction
• Controlling atomic spin-mixing via multiphoton transitions in a cavity
• Semiclassical Spin Exchange via Temperature-Dependent Transition States
• Engineering the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model with skin effects in Rydberg atom arrays