Quantum Optics

Light, Matter, and Quanta

Light

Matters

Many-body QED: Unraveling computational complexities of light and matter

We explore novel light-matter quantum systems to probe emergent phenomena of strongly-correlated quantum systems and push the boundaries of light, matter, and complexity.

1. Design background field with non-trivial constraints 2. dress with counterpart quantum fluctuation

waveguide qed

Massive photons in 1D and 2D photonic crystal media (substrate) interacting with neutral atom arrays

many-body qed

Strongly-interacting Rydberg atoms (substrate) coupled to optical cavity photons

simple quantum systems coupled to many-body baths

Upgrade all-to-all mean-field quantum systems with dissipative gadgets

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In quantum optics and quantum information science, dynamical forces are exerted onto a quantum system in contact with the noisy environment. For any exotic quantum state to emerge, the system is forced out of equilibrium as the equilibrium physics would be contained in the thermalized state of the reservoir. The conceptual paradigm is to explore the dynamics of open quantum systems, in which a quantum system is coupled to a complex bath that constantly perturbs and dissipates the system’s otherwise reversible dynamics.

An important frontier has been to push the boundary of strong coupling physics, so that a quantum system can be forced out of equilibrium with a drive consisting of just a single quanta, as evidenced by remarkable developments of strongly-coupled light-matter quantum systems. However, cavity QED and related cousins are intrinsically limited in their native scaling behaviours towards realizing complex quantum phenomena of light and matter.

Our general experimental approach is to construct a “substrate vacuum” out of an interacting quantum system, on top of which coherent atom-field coupling can drive more exotic dynamics in complexity than the original system. The viewpoint is to conceive the strong coherent and dissipative interactions within the substrate as the background field with its own constraints, and atom-field dynamics as the quantum resource to “upgrade” quantum-computational complexities in otherwise static but non-trivial vacuum of the strongly-interacting theory.

Understanding the surprising phenomena that can arise in highly-entangled quantum systems is one of the most exciting frontiers in modern science. The premise of our approach is the belief that insights and toolkits developed for quantum information science can be adapted to offer profound perspectives to understand generic physical processes in Nature. We thereby envision to understand and simulate “complex” physical processes as emergent behaviour of an underlying low-energy theory of a “simple” quantum system made of light and matter.

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