01698nas a2200169 4500008004100000245006000041210006000101260001500161300001100176490000800187520120500195100001801400700002101418700002701439700002501466856003701491 2017 eng d00aCorrelated Photon Dynamics in Dissipative Rydberg Media0 aCorrelated Photon Dynamics in Dissipative Rydberg Media c2017/07/26 a0436020 v1193 a
Rydberg blockade physics in optically dense atomic media under the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) leads to strong dissipative interactions between single photons. We introduce a new approach to analyzing this challenging many-body problem in the limit of large optical depth per blockade radius. In our approach, we separate the single-polariton EIT physics from Rydberg-Rydberg interactions in a serialized manner while using a hard-sphere model for the latter, thus capturing the dualistic particle-wave nature of light as it manifests itself in dissipative Rydberg-EIT media. Using this approach, we analyze the saturation behavior of the transmission through one-dimensional Rydberg-EIT media in the regime of non-perturbative dissipative interactions relevant to current experiments. Our model is in good agreement with experimental data. We also analyze a scheme for generating regular trains of single photons from continuous-wave input and derive its scaling behavior in the presence of imperfect single-photon EIT.
1 aZeuthen, Emil1 aGullans, Michael1 aMaghrebi, Mohammad, F.1 aGorshkov, Alexey, V. uhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06068