Efimov States of Strongly Interacting Photons

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.