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Poster Session

Poster Session III

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, Thursday June 19 Session S00 Oregon Convention Center:, Exhibit Hall E
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Dissipative Phase Transition in the Interaction of a Rydberg Polariton With a Single Rydberg Atom

Poster 79
Presenter: Peiran Niu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Authors: Tamara Sumarac (Harvard University), Emily Qiu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Shai Tsesses (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Adrian Menssen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Mikhail Lukin (Harvard University), Vladan Vuletic (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Collaboration: RYDBERG CLOUD LAB

Interactions between Rydberg atoms underpin many recent developments in quantum science and technology, such as NISQ-era quantum computation, complex many-body simulation, entanglement-enhanced metrology and strong optical nonlinearity at the single-photon level. In the latter case, photons propagate within atomic clouds as collective excitations termed Rydberg polaritons, strongly interacting with each other or with nearby stationary Rydberg atoms. In this work, we observe the full range of interaction regimes between a single Rydberg atom and a Rydberg polariton, divided into blockade, coherent exchange and incoherent hopping. We demonstrate that the transition from blockade to exchange is, in fact, a dissipative phase transition, arising from the closing of the energy gap between two polariton eigenstates, and further investigate the utility of the atom-polariton interaction for fast, non-destructive detection of Rydberg atoms.

Funding acknowledgement

MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold AtomsMIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE)

POSTERS (141)