Liang Qi-Yu, Venkatramani Aditya V, Cantu Sergio H, Nicholson Travis L, Gullans Michael J, Gorshkov Alexey V, Thompson Jeff D, Chin Cheng, Lukin Mikhail D, Vuletić Vladan
Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Science. 2018 Feb 16;359(6377):783-786. doi: 10.1126/science.aao7293.
Bound states of massive particles, such as nuclei, atoms, or molecules, constitute the bulk of the visible world around us. By contrast, photons typically only interact weakly. 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. Photon correlation and conditional phase measurements reveal the distinct bunching and phase features associated with three-photon and two-photon bound states. Such photonic trimers and dimers possess shape-preserving wave functions that depend on the constituent photon number. The observed bunching and strongly nonlinear optical phase are described by an effective field theory of Rydberg-induced photon-photon interactions. These observations demonstrate the ability to realize and control strongly interacting quantum many-body states of light.
诸如原子核、原子或分子等大质量粒子的束缚态构成了我们周围可见世界的主体。相比之下，光子通常仅发生弱相互作用。我们报告了在一种量子非线性介质中对传播的三光子束缚态的观测，其中光子之间的相互作用由原子里德堡态介导。光子关联和条件相位测量揭示了与三光子和双光子束缚态相关的独特聚束和相位特征。此类光子三聚体和二聚体具有依赖于组成光子数的形状保持波函数。观测到的聚束和强非线性光学相位由里德堡诱导的光子 - 光子相互作用的有效场论描述。这些观测结果证明了实现和控制光的强相互作用量子多体状态的能力。
