@article {2218, title = {Photon propagation through dissipative Rydberg media at large input rates}, year = {2018}, abstract = {

We study the dissipative propagation of quantized light in interacting Rydberg media under the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). Rydberg blockade physics in optically dense atomic media leads to strong dissipative interactions between single photons. The regime of high incoming photon flux constitutes a challenging many-body dissipative problem. We experimentally study in detail for the first time the pulse shapes and the second-order correlation function of the outgoing field and compare our data with simulations based on two novel theoretical approaches well-suited to treat this many-photon limit. At low incoming flux, we report good agreement between both theories and the experiment. For higher input flux, the intensity of the outgoing light is lower than that obtained from theoretical predictions. We explain this discrepancy using a simple phenomenological model taking into account pollutants, which are nearly-stationary Rydberg excitations coming from the reabsorption of scattered probe photons. At high incoming photon rates, the blockade physics results in unconventional shapes of measured correlation functions.\ 

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07586}, author = {Przemyslaw Bienias and James Douglas and Asaf Paris-Mandoki and Paraj Titum and Ivan Mirgorodskiy and Christoph Tresp and Emil Zeuthen and Michael Gullans and Marco Manzoni and Sebastian Hofferberth and Darrick Chang and Alexey V. Gorshkov} } @article {2144, title = {Photon Subtraction by Many-Body Decoherence}, year = {2018}, month = {2018/03/13}, abstract = {

We present an experimental and theoretical investigation of the scattering-induced decoherence of multiple photons stored in a strongly interacting atomic ensemble. We derive an exact solution to this many-body problem, allowing for a rigorous understanding of the underlying dissipative quantum dynamics. Combined with our experiments, this analysis demonstrates a correlated coherence-protection process, in which the induced decoherence of one photon can preserve the spatial coherence of all others. We discuss how this effect can be used to manipulate light at the quantum level, providing a robust mechanism for single-photon subtraction, and experimentally demonstrate this capability.

}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.113601}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10047}, author = {Callum R. Murray and Ivan Mirgorodskiy and Christoph Tresp and Christoph Braun and Asaf Paris-Mandoki and Alexey V. Gorshkov and Sebastian Hofferberth and Thomas Pohl} }