%0 Journal Article %J Phys. Rev. Lett., in press %D 2021 %T Tunable three-body loss in a nonlinear Rydberg medium %A Dalia P. Ornelas Huerta %A Przemyslaw Bienias %A Alexander N. Craddock %A Michael Gullans %A Andrew J. Hachtel %A Marcin Kalinowski %A Mary E. Lyon %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %A Steven L. Rolston %A J. V. Porto %X

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.

%B Phys. Rev. Lett., in press %8 9/28/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13599 %0 Journal Article %J Phys. Rev. Lett. %D 2020 %T Exotic photonic molecules via Lennard-Jones-like potentials %A Przemyslaw Bienias %A Michael Gullans %A Marcin Kalinowski %A Alexander N. Craddock %A Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta %A Steven L. Rolston %A J. V. Porto %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %X

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.

%B Phys. Rev. Lett. %V 125 %8 9/19/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07864 %N 093601 %R https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.093601 %0 Journal Article %D 2020 %T Resonant enhancement of three-body loss between strongly interacting photons %A Marcin Kalinowski %A Yidan Wang %A Przemyslaw Bienias %A Michael Gullans %A Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta %A Alexander N. Craddock %A Steven L. Rolston %A J. V. Porto %A Hans Peter Büchler %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %X

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

%8 10/19/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09772