Abstract

When light is coupled sequentially to a chain of atoms – or any other type of scatterer with internal structure – the resulting dynamics of the chain of systems is described by the formalism of cascaded quantum systems. I will report on recent work on the many-body dynamics of cascaded quantum systems in connection with chains of atoms coupled to a 1D waveguide. I will show that even for weakly coupled atoms a strongly correlated photon transport can occur. The photon correlations result from an interplay of nonlinearity and coupling to a loss reservoir, which creates a strong effective interaction between transmitted photons. I also want to talk about the effective quantum dynamics that can be generated in cascaded systems when the waveguide is looped and coupled more than once to one or more emitters. While the lecture will mainly deal with theoretical aspects, I will also briefly discuss related experimental observations in the groups of Arno Rauschenbeutel (U Berlin) and Philipp Treutlein (U Basel).

References: arXiv:1803.02428 [PRL 121, 143601 (2018)], arXiv:1910.05828, arXiv:1901.06891.

Experiments: arXiv:1911.09701, arXiv:2004.14424 [Science (May 2020)].