Quantum simulation with interacting photons

Abstract

Enhancing optical nonlinearities so that they become appreciable on the single photon level and lead to nonclassical light fields has been a central objective in quantum optics for many years. After this has been achieved in individual micro-cavities representing an effectively zero-dimensional volume, this line of research has shifted its focus towards engineering devices where such strong optical nonlinearities simultaneously occur in extended volumes of multiple nodes of a network. Recent technological progress in several experimental platforms now opens the possibility to employ the systems of strongly interacting photons these give rise to as quantum simulators. Here we review the recent development and current status of this research direction for theory and experiment. Addressing both, optical photons interacting with atoms and microwave photons in networks of superconducting circuits, we focus on analogue quantum simulations in scenarios where effective photon-photon interactions exceed dissipative processes in the considered platforms.

Precursor of the Laughlin state of hard-core bosons on a two-leg ladder

“…Originally discovered in two-dimensional electron gases [14], the fractional quantum Hall effect has eluded implementation in quantum simulators, despite multiple theoretical proposals suitable for ultracold atoms [15][16][17][18][19][20][21], photonic systems [22,23], Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard in coupled cavity arrays [24][25][26], circuit quantum electrodynamics [27,28], or circuit QED arrays of microwave cavities [29]. Recent proposals have been put forth for cylindrical geometries [30,31].…”

Gaussian Quantum Trajectories for the Variational Simulation of Open Quantum-Optical Systems

“…Many-body systems of interacting photons have come under intense investigation over the last few years, with both circuit QED-and semiconductor heterostructure-based systems [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The main difference with traditional many-body systems, both in hard and synthetic condensed matter, is the fact that the photon lifetime is typically shorter than the time at which the system dynamics develop.…”

Temporal and spectral manipulations of correlated photons using a time lens

“…Recently, spectral compression of photons has gained widespread attention in order to efficiently interface wide-band sources of correlated photons with narrow-band nodes of a quantum network, for example, quantum dots and atomic systems [11,[13][14][15]. At the same time, temporal magnification of photons facilitates high-fidelity photonic measurements in quantum simulations [16][17][18][19]. For example, on-chip temporal boson-sampling and quantum walks [20][21][22][23][24] can have photonic wavepackets with temporal features shorter than the resolution of existing single photon detectors [25][26][27].…”