ICFO-Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Castelldefels, 08860, Barcelona, Spain.
Nat Commun. 2017 Nov 23;8(1):1743. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01416-4.
A powerful method to interface quantum light with matter is to propagate the light through an ensemble of atoms. Recently, a number of such interfaces have emerged, most prominently Rydberg ensembles, that enable strong nonlinear interactions between propagating photons. A largely open problem is whether these systems produce exotic many-body states of light and developing new tools to study propagation in the large photon number limit is highly desirable. Here we provide a method based on a "spin model" that maps quasi one-dimensional (1D) light propagation to the dynamics of an open 1D interacting spin system, where all photon correlations are obtained from those of the spins. The spin dynamics in turn are numerically solved using the toolbox of matrix product states. We apply this formalism to investigate vacuum induced transparency, wherein the different photon number components of a pulse propagate with number-dependent group velocity and separate at output.
一种将量子光与物质相互作用的有效方法是让光通过原子集合传播。最近，出现了许多这样的界面，其中最突出的是里德堡集合，它们能够在传播光子之间产生强的非线性相互作用。一个很大的开放性问题是这些系统是否产生光的奇异多体状态，并且开发新的工具来研究在大光子数极限下的传播是非常可取的。在这里，我们提供了一种基于“自旋模型”的方法，它将准一维（1D）光传播映射到开放的 1D 相互作用自旋系统的动力学，其中所有光子相关性都可以从自旋的相关性中得到。自旋动力学反过来又使用矩阵乘积态的工具包进行数值求解。我们应用这种形式主义来研究真空诱导透明，其中脉冲的不同光子数分量以与数量相关的群速度传播，并在输出端分离。
