Effective Field Theory for Rydberg Polaritons

• Main Authors: Gullans, M. J (Author), Wang, Y. (Author), Lukin, M. D (Author), Gorshkov, A. V (Author), Thompson, Jeffrey Douglas (Contributor), Liang, Qiyu (Contributor), Vuletic, Vladan (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society, 2016-10-06T17:08:27Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We develop an effective field theory (EFT) to describe the few- and many-body propagation of one-dimensional Rydberg polaritons. We show that the photonic transmission through the Rydberg medium can be found by mapping the propagation problem to a nonequilibrium quench, where the role of time and space are reversed. We include effective range corrections in the EFT and show that they dominate the dynamics near scattering resonances in the presence of deep bound states. Finally, we show how the long-range nature of the Rydberg-Rydberg interactions induces strong effective N-body interactions between Rydberg polaritons. These results pave the way towards studying nonperturbative effects in quantum field theories using Rydberg polaritons.
MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms
U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Center for Distributed Quantum Information
National Science Foundation (U.S.) Quantum Information Science
United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research
United States. Army Research Office
United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Grant NSF PHY11-25915)