TY - JOUR T1 - Observation of three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium JF - Science Y1 - 2018 A1 - Qi-Yu Liang A1 - Aditya V. Venkatramani A1 - Sergio H. Cantu A1 - Travis L. Nicholson A1 - Michael Gullans A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Jeff D. Thompson A1 - Cheng Chin A1 - Mikhail D. Lukin A1 - Vladan Vuletic AB -

Bound states of massive particles, such as nuclei, atoms or molecules, are ubiquitous in nature and constitute the bulk of the visible world around us. In contrast, photons typically only weakly influence each other due to their very weak interactions and vanishing mass. We report the observation of traveling three-photon bound states in a quantum nonlinear medium where the interactions between photons are mediated by atomic Rydberg states. In particular, photon correlation and conditional phase measurements reveal the distinct features associated with three-photon and two-photon bound states. Such photonic trimers and dimers can be viewed as quantum solitons with shape-preserving wavefunctions that depend on the constituent photon number. The observed bunching and strongly nonlinear optical phase are quantitatively described by an effective field theory (EFT) of Rydberg-induced photon-photon interactions, which demonstrates the presence of a substantial effective three-body force between the photons. These observations pave the way towards the realization, studies, and control of strongly interacting quantum many-body states of light.

VL - 359 U4 - 783-786 UR - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/783 CP - 6377 U5 - 10.1126/science.aao7293 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Attractive Photons in a Quantum Nonlinear Medium JF - Nature (London) Y1 - 2013 A1 - Ofer Firstenberg A1 - Thibault Peyronel A1 - Qi-Yu Liang A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Mikhail D. Lukin A1 - Vladan Vuletic VL - 502 U4 - 71 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12512 ER -