@article {3505, title = {Ultrastrong light-matter interaction in a multimode photonic crystal}, year = {2024}, month = {2/21/2024}, abstract = {

Harnessing the interaction between light and matter at the quantum level has been a central theme in atomic physics and quantum optics, with applications from quantum computation to quantum metrology. Combining complex interactions with photonic synthetic materials provides an opportunity to investigate novel quantum phases and phenomena, establishing interesting connections to condensed matter physics. Here we explore many-body phenomena with a single artificial atom coupled to the many discrete modes of a photonic crystal. This experiment reaches the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime using the circuit quantum electrodynamics paradigm, by galvanically coupling a highly nonlinear fluxonium qubit to a tight-binding lattice of microwave resonators. In this regime, the transport of a single photon becomes a many-body problem, owing to the strong participation of multi-photon bound states arising from interactions that break particle number conservation. Exploiting the effective photon-photon interactions mediated by the qubit, the transport of multiple photons leads to complex multimode dynamics that can be employed for generating a continuous reservoir of strongly-correlated photons, an important resource for quantum networks. This work opens exciting prospects for exploring nonlinear quantum optics at the single-photon level and stabilizing entangled many-body phases of light.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14972}, author = {Andrei Vrajitoarea and Ron Belyansky and Rex Lundgren and Seth Whitsitt and Alexey V. Gorshkov and Andrew A. Houck} } @article {2762, title = {Frustration-induced anomalous transport and strong photon decay in waveguide QED}, journal = {Phys. Rev. Research}, volume = {3}, year = {2021}, month = {9/16/2021}, abstract = {

We study the propagation of photons in a one-dimensional environment consisting of two non-interacting species of photons frustratingly coupled to a single spin-1/2. The ultrastrong frustrated coupling leads to an extreme mixing of the light and matter degrees of freedom, resulting in the disintegration of the spin and a breakdown of the \"dressed-spin\", or polaron, description. Using a combination of numerical and analytical methods, we show that the elastic response becomes increasingly weak at the effective spin frequency, showing instead an increasingly strong and broadband response at higher energies. We also show that the photons can decay into multiple photons of smaller energies. The total probability of these inelastic processes can be as large as the total elastic scattering rate, or half of the total scattering rate, which is as large as it can be. The frustrated spin induces strong anisotropic photon-photon interactions that are dominated by inter-species interactions. Our results are relevant to state-of-the-art circuit and cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments.

}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.L032058}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03690}, author = {Ron Belyansky and Seth Whitsitt and Rex Lundgren and Yidan Wang and Andrei Vrajitoarea and Andrew A. Houck and Alexey V. Gorshkov} } @article {2609, title = {Transport and dynamics in the frustrated two-bath spin-boson model}, year = {2020}, month = {7/7/2020}, abstract = {

We study the strong coupling dynamics as well as transport properties of photons in the two-bath spin-boson model, in which a spin-1/2 particle is frustratingly coupled to two independent Ohmic bosonic baths. Using a combination of numerical and analytical methods, we show that the frustration in this model gives rise to rich physics in a very wide range of energies. This is in contrast to the one-bath spin-boson model, where the non-trivial physics occurs at an energy scale close to the renormalized spin frequency. The renormalized spin frequency in the two-bath spin-boson model is still important, featuring in different observables, including the non-equiblirum dynamics of both the spin and the baths along with the elastic transport properties of a photon. The latter however reveals a much more complex structure. The elastic scattering displays non-monotonic behavior at high frequencies, and is very different in the two channels: intra- and inter-bath scattering. The photon can also be inelastically scattered, a process in which it is split into several photons of smaller energies. We show that such inelastic processes are highly anisotropic, with the outgoing particles being preferentially emitted into only one of the baths. Moreover, the inelastic scattering rate is parameterically larger than in the one-bath case, and can even exceed the total elastic rate. Our results can be verified with state-of-the-art circuit and cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments.\ 

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03690}, author = {Ron Belyansky and Seth Whitsitt and Rex Lundgren and Yidan Wang and Andrei Vrajitoarea and Andrew A. Houck and Alexey V. Gorshkov} }