%0 Journal Article %J Physical Review Letters %D 2017 %T Correlated Photon Dynamics in Dissipative Rydberg Media %A Emil Zeuthen %A Michael Gullans %A Mohammad F. Maghrebi %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %X
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.
%B Physical Review Letters %V 119 %P 043602 %8 2017/07/26 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06068 %N 4 %R 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.043602