Effective Field Theory for Rydberg Polaritons

We develop an effective field theory (EFT) to describe the few- and many-body propagation of one-dimensional Rydberg polaritons. We show that the photonic transmission through the Rydberg medium can be found by mapping the propagation problem to a nonequilibrium quench, where the role of time and sp...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gullans, M. J., Wang, Y., Lukin, M. D., Gorshkov, A. V., Thompson, Jeffrey Douglas, Liang, Qiyu, Vuletic, Vladan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/104650
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5986-4514
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2430-7248
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-0538
Description
Summary:We develop an effective field theory (EFT) to describe the few- and many-body propagation of one-dimensional Rydberg polaritons. We show that the photonic transmission through the Rydberg medium can be found by mapping the propagation problem to a nonequilibrium quench, where the role of time and space are reversed. We include effective range corrections in the EFT and show that they dominate the dynamics near scattering resonances in the presence of deep bound states. Finally, we show how the long-range nature of the Rydberg-Rydberg interactions induces strong effective N-body interactions between Rydberg polaritons. These results pave the way towards studying nonperturbative effects in quantum field theories using Rydberg polaritons.