TY - JOUR T1 - Dissipative Many-body Quantum Optics in Rydberg Media JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2013 A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Rejish Nath A1 - Thomas Pohl AB - We develop a theoretical framework for the dissipative propagation of quantized light in interacting optical media under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The theory allows us to determine the peculiar spatiotemporal structure of the output of two complementary Rydberg-EIT-based light-processing modules: the recently demonstrated single-photon filter and the recently proposed single-photon subtractor, which, respectively, let through and absorb a single photon. In addition to being crucial for applications of these and other optical quantum devices, the theory opens the door to the study of exotic dissipative many-body dynamics of strongly interacting photons in nonlinear nonlocal media. VL - 110 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.7060v1 CP - 15 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.153601 ER -