Mean field theory of weakly-interacting Rydberg polaritons in the EIT system based on the nearest-neighbor distribution

Abstract

The combination of high optical nonlinearity in the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect and strong electric dipole-dipole interaction (DDI) among the Rydberg-state atoms can lead to important applications in quantum information processing and many-body physics. One can utilize the Rydberg-EIT system in the strongly-interacting regime to mediate photon-photon interaction or qubit-qubit operation. One can also employ the Rydberg-EIT system in the weaklyinteracting regime to study the Bose-Einstein condensation of Rydberg polaritons. Most of the present theoretical models dealt with the strongly-interacting cases. Here, we consider the weaklyinteracting regime and develop a mean field model based on the nearest-neighbor distribution. Using the mean field model, we further derive the analytical formulas for the attenuation coefficient and phase shift of the output probe field. The predictions from the formulas are consistent with the experimental data in the weakly-interacting regime, verifying the validity of our model. As the DDI-induced phase shift and attenuation can be seen as the consequences of elastic and inelastic collisions among particles, this work provides a very useful tool for conceiving ideas relevant to the EIT system of weakly-interacting Rydberg polaritons, and for evaluating experimental feasibility.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• A Weakly-Interacting Many-Body System of Rydberg Polaritons Based on Electromagnetically Induced Transparency
• Experimental Demonstration of Stationary Dark-State Polaritons Dressed by Dipole-Dipole Interaction
• Nonlinear absorption in interacting Rydberg electromagnetically-induced-transparency spectra on two-photon resonance
• Resonant Dipole-Dipole Interactions in Electromagnetically Induced Transparency
• Increasing decoherence rate of Rydberg polaritons due to accumulating dark Rydberg atoms