Strongly Correlated Photon Transport in Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics with Weakly Coupled Emitters

authored by

Sahand Mahmoodian, Mantas Čepulkovskis, Sumanta Das, Peter Lodahl, Klemens Hammerer, Anders S. Sørensen

Abstract

We show that strongly correlated photon transport can be observed in waveguides containing optically dense ensembles of emitters. Remarkably, this occurs even for weak coupling efficiencies. Specifically, we compute the photon transport properties through a chirally coupled system of N two-level systems driven by a weak coherent field, where each emitter can also scatter photons out of the waveguide. The photon correlations arise due to an interplay of nonlinearity and coupling to a loss reservoir, which creates a strong effective interaction between transmitted photons. The highly correlated photon states are less susceptible to losses than uncorrelated photons and have a power-law decay with N. This is described using a simple universal asymptotic solution governed by a single scaling parameter which describes photon bunching and power transmission. We show numerically that, for randomly placed emitters, these results hold even in systems without chirality. The effect can be observed in existing tapered fiber setups with trapped atoms.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Theoretical Physics

External Organisation(s)

University of Copenhagen

Type

Article

Journal

Physical Review Letters

Volume

121

ISSN

0031-9007

Publication date

05.10.2018

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Physics and Astronomy(all)

Electronic version(s)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02428 (Access: Open)
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.143601 (Access: Closed)