TY - JOUR T1 - Tunable three-body loss in a nonlinear Rydberg medium JF - Phys. Rev. Lett., in press Y1 - 2021 A1 - Dalia P. Ornelas Huerta A1 - Przemyslaw Bienias A1 - Alexander N. Craddock A1 - Michael Gullans A1 - Andrew J. Hachtel A1 - Marcin Kalinowski A1 - Mary E. Lyon A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Steven L. Rolston A1 - J. V. Porto AB -

Long-range Rydberg interactions, in combination with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), give rise to strongly interacting photons where the strength, sign, and form of the interactions are widely tunable and controllable. Such control can be applied to both coherent and dissipative interactions, which provides the potential to generate novel few-photon states. Recently it has been shown that Rydberg-EIT is a rare system in which three-body interactions can be as strong or stronger than two-body interactions. In this work, we study a three-body scattering loss for Rydberg-EIT in a wide regime of single and two-photon detunings. Our numerical simulations of the full three-body wavefunction and analytical estimates based on Fermi's Golden Rule strongly suggest that the observed features in the outgoing photonic correlations are caused by the resonant enhancement of the three-body losses.

UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13599 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Exotic photonic molecules via Lennard-Jones-like potentials JF - Phys. Rev. Lett. Y1 - 2020 A1 - Przemyslaw Bienias A1 - Michael Gullans A1 - Marcin Kalinowski A1 - Alexander N. Craddock A1 - Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta A1 - Steven L. Rolston A1 - J. V. Porto A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov AB -

Ultracold systems offer an unprecedented level of control of interactions between atoms. An important challenge is to achieve a similar level of control of the interactions between photons. Towards this goal, we propose a realization of a novel Lennard-Jones-like potential between photons coupled to the Rydberg states via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). This potential is achieved by tuning Rydberg states to a F{ö}rster resonance with other Rydberg states. We consider few-body problems in 1D and 2D geometries and show the existence of self-bound clusters ("molecules") of photons. We demonstrate that for a few-body problem, the multi-body interactions have a significant impact on the geometry of the molecular ground state. This leads to phenomena without counterparts in conventional systems: For example, three photons in 2D preferentially arrange themselves in a line-configuration rather than in an equilateral-triangle configuration. Our result opens a new avenue for studies of many-body phenomena with strongly interacting photons.

VL - 125 UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07864 CP - 093601 U5 - https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.093601 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Resonant enhancement of three-body loss between strongly interacting photons Y1 - 2020 A1 - Marcin Kalinowski A1 - Yidan Wang A1 - Przemyslaw Bienias A1 - Michael Gullans A1 - Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta A1 - Alexander N. Craddock A1 - Steven L. Rolston A1 - J. V. Porto A1 - Hans Peter Büchler A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov AB -

Rydberg polaritons provide an example of a rare type of system where three-body interactions can be as strong or even stronger than two-body interactions. The three-body interactions can be either dispersive or dissipative, with both types possibly giving rise to exotic, strongly-interacting, and topological phases of matter. Despite past theoretical and experimental studies of the regime with dispersive interaction, the dissipative regime is still mostly unexplored. Using a renormalization group technique to solve the three-body Schrödinger equation, we show how the shape and strength of dissipative three-body forces can be universally enhanced for Rydberg polaritons. We demonstrate how these interactions relate to the transmission through a single-mode cavity, which can be used as a probe of the three-body physics in current experiment

UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09772 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Dark state optical lattice with sub-wavelength spatial structure JF - Phys. Rev. Lett. Y1 - 2018 A1 - Yang Wang A1 - Sarthak Subhankar A1 - Przemyslaw Bienias A1 - Mateusz Lacki A1 - Tsz-Chun Tsui A1 - Mikhail A. Baranov A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Peter Zoller A1 - James V. Porto A1 - Steven L. Rolston AB -

We report on the experimental realization of a conservative optical lattice for cold atoms with a subwavelength spatial structure. The potential is based on the nonlinear optical response of three-level atoms in laser-dressed dark states, which is not constrained by the diffraction limit of the light generating the potential. The lattice consists of a one-dimensional array of ultranarrow barriers with widths less than 10 nm, well below the wavelength of the lattice light, physically realizing a Kronig-Penney potential. We study the band structure and dissipation of this lattice and find good agreement with theoretical predictions. Even on resonance, the observed lifetimes of atoms trapped in the lattice are as long as 44 ms, nearly 105times the excited state lifetime, and could be further improved with more laser intensity. The potential is readily generalizable to higher dimensions and different geometries, allowing, for example, nearly perfect box traps, narrow tunnel junctions for atomtronics applications, and dynamically generated lattices with subwavelength spacings.

VL - 120 U4 - 083601 UR - https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.083601 U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.083601 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Dissipation induced dipole blockade and anti-blockade in driven Rydberg systems JF - Phys. Rev. A Y1 - 2018 A1 - Jeremy T. Young A1 - Thomas Boulier A1 - Eric Magnan A1 - Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt A1 - Ryan M. Wilson A1 - Steven L. Rolston A1 - James V. Porto A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov AB -

We study theoretically and experimentally the competing blockade and antiblockade effects induced by spontaneously generated contaminant Rydberg atoms in driven Rydberg systems. These contaminant atoms provide a source of strong dipole-dipole interactions and play a crucial role in the system's behavior. We study this problem theoretically using two different approaches. The first is a cumulant expansion approximation, in which we ignore third-order and higher connected correlations. Using this approach for the case of resonant drive, a many-body blockade radius picture arises, and we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results. We further predict that as the atomic density is increased, the Rydberg population's dependence on Rabi frequency will transition from quadratic to linear dependence at lower Rabi frequencies. We study this behavior experimentally by observing this crossover at two different atomic densities. We confirm that the larger density system has a smaller crossover Rabi frequency than the smaller density system. The second theoretical approach is a set of phenomenological inhomogeneous rate equations. We compare the results of our rate-equation model to the experimental observations [E. A. Goldschmidt et al.Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 113001 (2016)] and find that these rate equations provide quantitatively good scaling behavior of the steady-state Rydberg population for both resonant and off-resonant drives.

VL - 97 U4 - 023424 UR - https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.97.023424 U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevA.97.023424 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Optimal and Secure Measurement Protocols for Quantum Sensor Networks Y1 - 2018 A1 - Zachary Eldredge A1 - Michael Foss-Feig A1 - Steven L. Rolston A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov AB -

Studies of quantum metrology have shown that the use of many-body entangled states can lead to an enhancement in sensitivity when compared to product states. In this paper, we quantify the metrological advantage of entanglement in a setting where the quantity to be measured is a linear function of parameters coupled to each qubit individually. We first generalize the Heisenberg limit to the measurement of non-local observables in a quantum network, deriving a bound based on the multi-parameter quantum Fisher information. We then propose a protocol that can make use of GHZ states or spin-squeezed states, and show that in the case of GHZ states the procedure is optimal, i.e., it saturates our bound.

UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.04646 U5 - https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.97.042337 ER -