Efimov States of Strongly Interacting Photons

Published

December 4, 2017

Author(s)

Jacob M. Taylor, Alexey V. Gorshkov, Michael Gullans, D Ruzik, Seth Rittenhouse, J.P. D'Incao, Paul Julienne, S Diehl

Abstract

We introduce a new system to study Efimov physics based on interacting photons in cold gases of Rydberg atoms. This system has a large anisotropy between the longitudinal mass of the photons, arising from dispersion, and the transverse mass of the photons, arising from diffraction. Neverthe- less, we show that the effective interactions become dominated by s-wave scattering near threshold and, as a result, give rise to an Efimov effect near unitarity. We show that the three-body loss of the Efimov trimers can be strongly suppressed and determine conditions under which these states are observable in current experiments. These effects can be naturally extended to probe few-body universality beyond three bodies, as well as the role of Efimov physics in the non-equilbrium, many- body regime.

Citation

Physical Review Letters

Volume

119

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.233601

Keywords

Cold atoms, rydberg, polariton, nonlinear, efimov

Citation

Taylor, J. , Gorshkov, A. , Gullans, M. , Ruzik, D. , Rittenhouse, S. , D'Incao, J. , Julienne, P. and Diehl, S. (2017), Efimov States of Strongly Interacting Photons, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.233601 (Accessed October 14, 2025)