Quantum many‐body phenomena in coupled cavity arrays

Abstract

The increasing level of experimental control over atomic and optical systems gained in the past years have paved the way for the exploration of new physical regimes in quantum optics and atomic physics, characterised by the appearance of quantum many-body phenomena, originally encountered only in condensed-matter physics, and the possibility of experimentally accessing them in a more controlled manner. In this review article we survey recent theoretical studies concerning the use of cavity quantum electrodynamics to create quantum manybody systems. Based on recent experimental progress in the fabrication of arrays of interacting micro-cavities and on their coupling to atomic-like structures in several different physical architectures, we review proposals on the realisation of paradigmatic many-body models in such systems, such as the BoseHubbard and the anisotropic Heisenberg models. Such arrays of coupled cavities offer interesting properties as simulators of quantum many-body physics, including the full addressability of individual sites and the accessibility of inhomogeneous models.Crystal light: Photons (yellow) that ordinarily move freely through an array of cavities (top) might be frozen in place by their mutual repulsion (bottom). Such repulsion can be induced by laser pumping of suitable atoms (red) placed in the cavities.

Symmetry-protected topological phases in spin ladders with two-body interactions

“…8(a)), where the quantized cavity fields couple to their nearest neighbors in the longitudinal (L) and the transverse (T) directions via photon hopping. 28 The spin degrees of freedom on each site are encoded in the internal states of a single atom trapped inside the cavity.…”

“…In such a system, atoms or solid spins interact with the quantized cavity fields, which couple to their neighboring ones across both the longitudinal and transverse directions via photon hopping. 28 The two-level system in our general model can be replaced by a three-level structure, with two low-lying hyperfine states and an electronically excited state. Correspondingly, the coupling g L j,k (g T j,k ) in the general model is replaced by a Raman path in the longitudinal (transverse) direction, with an external laser field and a cavity mode each contributing a leg in the Raman coupling.…”

Polymeric photonic molecule super-mode lasers on silicon

“…The dye-doped PMs were optically pumped with 10 ns pulses of a frequency doubled Nd:YVO 4 laser at a pump wavelength of 532 nm and a repetition rate of 20 Hz. The pump pulses were focused onto the PM under an incident angle of 45 6 with respect to the substrate normal using a lens.…”

Scattering and Bound States of two Polaritons in an Array of Coupled Cavities

“…It is predicted that, such systems can be used in quantum information processing [1][2][3][4][5] as well as the quantum simulation of many-body systems, e.g., the quantum phase simulation [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], quantum Hall effect [21] and Bose-Einstein condensate [22]. For the few-body physics of coupled cavities, many authors have studied the single-photon transmission in a 1D cavity array coupled with a single atom [1], and the dynamics of a single polariton in a 1D cavity array with each cavity coupled to an atom [2,7].…”