Single-photon bound states in atomic ensembles
Abstract
We illustrate the existence of single-excitation bound states for propagating photons interacting with two-level atoms. These bound states can be calculated from an effective spin model, and their existence relies on dissipation in the system. The appearance of these bound states is in a one-to-one correspondence with zeros in the single-photon transmission and with divergent bunching in the second-order photon-photon correlation function. We also formulate a dissipative version of Levinson's theorem for this system by looking at the relation between the number of bound states and the winding number of the transmission phases. This theorem allows a direct experimental measurement of the number of bound states using the measured transmission phases.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1809.01147,
title = {Single-photon bound states in atomic ensembles},
author = {Yidan Wang and Michael J. Gullans and Antoine Browaeys and J. V. Porto and Darrick E. Chang and Alexey V. Gorshkov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.01147},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
11 pages, 3+2 figures