Abstract
We study the dissipative propagation of quantized light in interacting Rydberg media under the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency. Rydberg blockade physics in optically dense atomic media leads to strong dissipative interactions between single photons. The regime of high incoming photon flux constitutes a challenging many-body dissipative problem. We experimentally study in detail the pulse shapes and the second-order correlation function of the outgoing field and compare our data with simulations based on two novel theoretical approaches well-suited to treat this many-photon limit. At low incoming flux, we report good agreement between both theories and the experiment. For higher input flux, the intensity of the outgoing light is lower than that obtained from theoretical predictions. We explain this discrepancy using a simple phenomenological model taking into account pollutants, which are nearly stationary Rydberg excitations coming from the reabsorption of scattered probe photons. At high incoming photon rates, the blockade physics results in unconventional shapes of measured correlation functions.
Highlights
A number of platforms enable strong interactions between photons at the level of single quanta [1], with Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency [2,3] being promising [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
The ansatz relies on the fact that, in many systems, the complete Hilbert space, which grows exponentially with atom number, is not necessary for a faithful representation of the physical states that occur, and, instead, a substantially restricted set of states, those formed from matrix products, is sufficient
While the results of matrix product states (MPSs) simulations presented in the previous section qualitatively reproduce the experimentally observed effects both in the probe pulse shape and in the steady-state correlation functions, the lack of quantitative agreement suggests that the Rydberg pollutants we register in the experiment may have a strong effect on the probe pulse transmission even at low photon rates 4 ph/μs, which is lower than what Figs. 3(b) and 3(c) may suggest
Summary
A number of platforms enable strong interactions between photons at the level of single quanta [1], with Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency (rEIT) [2,3] being promising [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Rydberg blockade leads to a local maximum in R(t ) and g(2)(τ ) outside the blockade time τb This hump in output intensity [shown schematically in Fig. 1(d)] and correlations comes from the interplay of blockade physics, the finite width of the EIT transparency window, and the temporal shape of the input pulse. We explore this regime experimentally and find qualitative signs of what the theories predict Both the theoretical model and MPS numerics differ quantitatively from the experimentally observed time traces and correlations for high incoming photon rates. We believe that these deviations between theory and experiment are due to Rydberg pollutants, i.e., additional Rydberg excitations (in |s and other nearby Rydberg states) which are created by scattered probe photons.
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