Fractional Quantum Hall Physics with Interacting Floquet Polaritons

Photonic systems offer a promising new platform for exploring the exotic features of topological quantum materials on a particle-by-particle basis. We describe our efforts to explore this physics using cavity Rydberg polaritons - hybrids of an optical cavity photon and an atomic Rydberg excitation - which can interact with each other while moving in a synthetic magnetic field. Using Floquet engineering, we isolate a small, degenerate ‘puddle’ of states, in which interacting photons can self-organize with topological order. This platform has enabled our initial experiments on creating and detecting photonic Laughlin states, the ground states of a fractional quantum Hall system.