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Effective Field Theory for Rydberg Polaritons

Published

Author(s)

Michael Gullans, Yidan Wang, Jeff D. Thompson, Qiyu Liang, Vladan Vuletic, Mikhail D. Lukin, Alexey V. Gorshkov

Abstract

We develop an effective field theory (EFT) to describe the few- and many-body propagation of one- dimensional Rydberg polaritons. We show that the photonic transmission through the Rydberg medium can be found by mapping the propagation problem to a nonequilibrium quench, where the role of time and space are reversed. We include effective range corrections in the EFT and show that they dominate the dynamics near scattering resonances in the presence of deep bound states. Finally, we show how the long-range nature of the Rydberg- Rydberg interactions induces strong effective N-body interactions between Rydberg polaritons. These results pave the way towards studying nonperturbative effects in quantum field theories using Rydberg polaritons.
Citation
Physical Review Letters
Volume
117

Keywords

Rydberg atoms, quantum optics

Citation

Gullans, M. , Wang, Y. , Thompson, J. , Liang, Q. , Vuletic, V. , Lukin, M. and Gorshkov, A. (2016), Effective Field Theory for Rydberg Polaritons, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.113601 (Accessed April 25, 2024)
Created September 9, 2016, Updated November 10, 2018