No Arabic abstract
Understanding strongly correlated quantum systems is a central problem in many areas of physics. The collective behavior of interacting particles gives rise to diverse fundamental phenomena such as confinement in quantum chromodynamics, phase transitions, and electron fractionalization in the quantum Hall regime. While such systems typically involve massive particles, optical photons can also interact with each other in a nonlinear medium. In practice, however, such interactions are often very weak. Here we describe a novel technique that allows the creation of a strongly correlated quantum gas of photons using one-dimensional optical systems with tight field confinement and coherent photon trapping techniques. The confinement enables the generation of large, tunable optical nonlinearities via the interaction of photons with a nearby cold atomic gas. In its extreme, we show that a quantum light field can undergo fermionization in such one-dimensional media, which can be probed via standard photon correlation measurements.
We investigate the properties of strongly interacting heteronuclear boson-boson mixtures loaded in realistic optical lattices, with particular emphasis on the physics of interfaces. In particular, we numerically reproduce the recent experimental observation that the addition of a small fraction of K induces a significant loss of coherence in Rb, providing a simple explanation. We then investigate the robustness against the inhomogeneity typical of realistic experimental realizations of the glassy quantum emulsions recently predicted to occur in strongly interacting boson-boson mixtures on ideal homogeneous lattices.
We present a comprehensive study of the Bose-Einstein condensate to Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BEC-BCS) crossover in fermionic $^6$Li using Bragg spectroscopy. A smooth transition from molecular to atomic spectra is observed with a clear signature of pairing at and above unitarity. These spectra probe the dynamic and static structure factors of the gas and provide a direct link to two-body correlations. We have characterised these correlations and measured their density dependence across the broad Feshbach resonance at 834 G.
We demonstrate the emergence of universal Efimov physics for interacting photons in cold gases of Rydberg atoms. We consider the behavior of three photons injected into the gas in their propagating frame, where a paraxial approximation allows us to consider them as massive particles. In contrast to atoms and nuclei, the photons have a large anisotropy between their longitudinal mass, arising from dispersion, and their transverse mass, arising from diffraction. Nevertheless, we show that in suitably rescaled coordinates the effective interactions become dominated by s-wave scattering near threshold and, as a result, give rise to an Efimov effect near unitarity. We show that the three-body loss of these Efimov trimers can be strongly suppressed and determine conditions under which these states are observable in current experiments. These effects can be naturally extended to probe few-body universality beyond three bodies, as well as the role of Efimov physics in the non-equilbrium, many-body regime.
Realizing a strong interaction between individual optical photons is an important objective of research in quantum science and technology. Since photons do not interact directly, this goal requires, e.g., an optical medium in which the light experiences a phase shift that depends nonlinearly on the photon number. Once the additional phase shift for two photons reaches pi, such an ultra-strong nonlinearity could even enable the direct implementation of high-fidelity quantum logic operations. However, the nonlinear response of standard optical media is many orders of magnitude too weak for this task. Here, we demonstrate the realization of an optical fiber-based nonlinearity that leads to an additional two-photon phase shift close to the ideal value of pi. Our scheme employs a whispering-gallery-mode resonator, interfaced by an optical nanofiber, where the presence of a single rubidium atom in the resonator results in a strongly nonlinear response. We experimentally show that this results in entanglement of initially independent incident photons. The demonstration of this ultra-strong nonlinearity in a fiber-integrated system is a decisive step towards scalable quantum logics with optical photons.
We investigate the lifetime of angular momentum in an ultracold strongly interacting Fermi gas, confined in a trap with controllable ellipticity. To determine the angular momentum we measure the precession of the radial quadrupole mode. We find that in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance the deeply hydrodynamic behavior in the normal phase leads to a very long lifetime of the angular momentum. Furthermore, we examine the dependence of the decay rate of the angular momentum on the ellipticity of the trapping potential and the interaction strength. The results are in general agreement with the theoretically expected behavior for a Boltzmann gas.