Phys. Rev. Research 5, 043135 (2023)
Giant-atom Effects on Population and Entanglement Dynamics of Rydberg Atoms in the Optical Regime
Yao-Tong Chen1, Lei Du2,*, Yan Zhang1, Lingzhen Guo3, Jin-Hui Wu1,†, M. Artoni4,5, and G. C. La Rocca6
1 School of Physics and Center for Quantum Sciences, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China
2 Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology, 41296 Gothenburg, Sweden
3 Center for Joint Quantum Studies and Department of Physics, School of Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
4 Department of Chemistry and Physics of Materials, University of Brescia, 25133 Brescia, Italy
5 European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
6 NEST, Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, I-56126 Pisa, Italy
* lei.du@chalmers.se; † jhwu@nenu.edu.cn
Abstract
Giant atoms are attracting interest as an emerging paradigm in the quantum optics of engineered waveguides. At variance with the well-known artificial giant atoms for microwave photonics, here we propose the archetype of a giant atom working in the optical regime by considering a pair of interacting Rydberg atoms coupled to a photonic crystal waveguide (PCW) and also driven by a coherent field. Giant-atom effects are observed as a phase-dependent decay of the double Rydberg excitation during the initial evolution stage while a nontrivial internal entanglement is exhibited at later times. Such an entanglement onset occurs in the presence of intrinsic atomic decay toward nonguided vacuum modes and is accompanied by antibunching in the emitted photons. Our predictions should be observable in current Rydberg-PCW experiments and may open the way toward giant-atom optical photonics for quantum information processing.
