Altering Photon Statistics using Strong Rydberg Interactions

ORAL

Abstract

The recent advance in coherently controlling and manipulating strong, long-range Rydberg interactions has triggered extensive research in studying interesting many-body effects as, e.g. the use of Rydberg blockade effects for quantum information processing and crystal formation. In this talk I show that Rydberg interactions can be used to alter the photon statistics of a weak probe field after propagating in a coherently prepared atomic Rydberg gas under conditions of Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT). The Rydberg blockade mechanism leads to an effective two-level physics when two photons are separated less than the blockade radius resulting in a strong anti-correlation of two photons separated by an avoided volume. Implications of the formation of such hard-sphere photons for the recent experiment of Pritchard et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 193603 (2010)] and the observation of such correlation in future experiments will be discussed.

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Authors

  • Johannes Otterbach

    • Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
    • Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
    • Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
    • Harvard University

  • David Petrosyan

    • Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, FORTH, Crete, Greece

  • Alexey V. Gorshkov

    • Institute for Quantum Information, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

  • Thomas Pohl

    • Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

  • Michael Fleischhauer

    • Department of Physics and Research Center OPTIMAS, TU Kaiserslautern, Germany

  • Mikhail D. Lukin

    • Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA