Interacting Stationary Rydberg Polaritons in Two Dimensions

涉及高激发态里德伯态的电磁感应透明（EIT）已成为原子介质中单光子之间强合成相互作用的一种强有力的中介技术。基于我们在SPP GiRyd第一个资助期对rydberg - eit条件下非线性非局部磁化率性质的实验和理论发现，我们建议将我们的研究扩展到通过一种新的rydbergdresingscheme获得相互作用的稳态基态极化子。这种方法将使我们能够研究光传播横向二维几何中的光子动力学，从而通过容纳前所未有的大量相互作用光子，为多体现象打开大门。此外，使用由基态激发组成的静止光极化可以大大提高相干性和增加相互作用时间，而所提出的里德伯格修饰方案将在里德伯格- eit设置中提供一个新的相互作用控制水平，并使实验中首次实现脉冲光子成为可能。因此，提出的项目为探索非平衡多体量子动力学和光的奇异量子态的出现提供了独特的机会，无论是在理论还是实验中。

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) involving highlyexcited Rydberg states has become a powerful technique to mediatestrong synthetic interactions between single photons in an atomicmedium. Based upon our experimental and theoretical findings on thenature of the nonlinear, non-local susceptibility under Rydberg-EITconditions during the first funding period of the SPP GiRyd, wepropose to extend our investigations to stationary ground-statepolaritons which acquire interactions through a novel Rydbergdressingscheme. This approach will allow us to study the photondynamics in the two-dimensional geometry transverse to the lightpropagation, and thereby open the door to many-body phenomena byaccommodating unprecedentedly larger number of interactingphotons. Moreover, the use of stationary-light polaritons composed ofground-state excitations yields drastically improved coherenceproperties and enhanced interaction times, while the proposedRydberg-dressing scheme will provide a new level of interactioncontrol in Rydberg-EIT settings and make it possible to realizerepulsive photons for the first time in experiments. The proposedproject thus provides unique opportunities for the exploration of nonequilibriummany-body quantum dynamics and the emergence ofexotic quantum states of light, both in theory and experiment.