@article {1814, title = {Correlated Photon Dynamics in Dissipative Rydberg Media}, journal = {Physical Review Letters}, volume = {119}, year = {2017}, month = {2017/07/26}, pages = {043602}, abstract = {

Rydberg blockade physics in optically dense atomic media under the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) leads to strong dissipative interactions between single photons. We introduce a new approach to analyzing this challenging many-body problem in the limit of large optical depth per blockade radius. In our approach, we separate the single-polariton EIT physics from Rydberg-Rydberg interactions in a serialized manner while using a hard-sphere model for the latter, thus capturing the dualistic particle-wave nature of light as it manifests itself in dissipative Rydberg-EIT media. Using this approach, we analyze the saturation behavior of the transmission through one-dimensional Rydberg-EIT media in the regime of non-perturbative dissipative interactions relevant to current experiments. Our model is in good agreement with experimental data. We also analyze a scheme for generating regular trains of single photons from continuous-wave input and derive its scaling behavior in the presence of imperfect single-photon EIT.

}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.043602}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06068}, author = {Emil Zeuthen and Michael Gullans and Mohammad F. Maghrebi and Alexey V. Gorshkov} }