Marina Litinskaya, Roman V. Krems
Ultracold polar molecules trapped on an optical lattice is a many-body system that, under appropriate conditions, may support collective excitations reminiscent of excitons in solid state crystals. Here, we discuss the rotational excitations of molecules on an optical lattice leading to rotational Frenkel excitons. Apart from solid hydrogen, there is no other natural system that exhibits rotational excitons. The rotational excitons have unique properties that can be exploited for tuning non-linear exciton interactions and exciton-impurity scattering by applying an external electric field. We show that this can be used to explore the competing role of the dynamical and kinematic exciton-exciton interactions in excitonic energy transfer and to study quantum localization in a dynamically tunable disordered potential. The rotational excitons can also be used as a basis for quantum simulation of condensed matter models that cannot be realized with ultracold atoms. As an example, we discuss the possibility of engineering the Holstein model with polar molecules on an optical lattice.
Marina Litinskaya, Edoardo Tignone, Guido Pupillo
Jul 28, 2016·quant-ph·PDF We study interactions between polaritons, arising when photons strongly couple to collective excitations in an array of two-level atoms trapped in an optical lattice inside a cavity. We consider two types of interactions between atoms: Dipolar forces and atomic saturability, which ranges from hard-core repulsion to Rydberg blockade. We show that, in spite of the underlying repulsion in the subsystem of atomic excitations, saturability induces a broadband bunching of photons for two-polariton scattering states. We interpret this bunching as a result of interference, and trace it back to the mismatch of the quantization volumes for atomic excitations and photons. We examine also bound bipolaritonic states: These include states created by dipolar forces, as well as a gap bipolariton, which forms solely due to saturability effects in the atomic transition. Both types of bound states exhibit strong bunching in the photonic component. We discuss the dependence of bunching on experimentally relevant parameters.
Marina Litinskaya, Edoardo Tignone, Guido Pupillo
We demonstrate theoretically that photon-photon attraction can be engineered in the continuum of scattering states for pairs of photons propagating in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with cold atoms. The atoms are regularly spaced in an optical lattice configuration and the photons are resonantly tuned to an internal atomic transition. We show that the hard-core repulsion resulting from saturation of the atomic transitions induces bunching in the photonic component of the collective atom-photon modes (polaritons). Bunching is obtained in a frequency range as large as tens of GHz, and can be controlled by the inter-atomic separation. We provide a fully analytical explanation for this phenomenon by proving that correlations result from a mismatch of the quantization volumes for atomic excitations and photons in the continuum. Even stronger correlations can be observed for in-gap two-polariton bound states. Our theoretical results use parameters relevant for current experiments with Rb atoms excited on the D2-line.
Ping Xiang, Marina Litinskaya, Roman V. Krems
Rotational excitation of polar molecules trapped in an optical lattice gives rise to rotational excitons. Here we show that non-linear interactions of such excitons can be controlled by an electric field. The exciton--exciton interactions can be tuned to induce exciton pairing, leading to the formation of biexcitons. Tunable non-linear interactions between excitons can be used for many applications ranging from the controlled preparation of entangled quasiparticles to the study of polaron interactions and the effects of non-linear interactions on quantum energy transport in molecular aggregates.
Marina Litinskaya, Evgeny A. Shapiro
We describe propagation of light in a gas with periodic density modulation, demonstrating photonic-crystal-like refraction with negative refraction angles. We address the role of poorly defined boundaries and damping, and derive an optical analog of the quantum adiabatic theorem. For Cs atoms in an optical lattice, we show that relying on semi-adiabatic propagation one can excite and spatially split positively and negatively refracting modes at experimentally available gas densities.
Felipe Herrera, Marina Litinskaya, Roman V. Krems
In the present work, we demonstrate the possibility of controlling by an external field the dynamics of collective excitations (excitons) of molecules on an optical lattice. We show that a suitably chosen two-species mixture of ultracold polar molecules loaded on an optical lattice forms a phononless crystal, where exciton-impurity interactions can be controlled by applying an external electric field. This can be used for the controlled creation of many-body entangled states of ultracold molecules and the time-domain quantum simulation of disorder-induced localization and delocalization of quantum particles.
Ping Xiang, Marina Litinskaya, Evgeny A. Shapiro, Roman V. Krems
Sep 24, 2012·quant-ph·PDF An elementary excitation in an aggregate of coupled particles generates a collective excited state. We show that the dynamics of these excitations can be controlled by applying a transient external potential which modifies the phase of the quantum states of the individual particles. The method is based on an interplay of adiabatic and sudden time scales in the quantum evolution of the many-body states. We show that specific phase transformations can be used to accelerate or decelerate quantum energy transfer and spatially focus delocalized excitations onto different parts of arrays of quantum particles. We consider possible experimental implementations of the proposed technique and study the effect of disorder due to the presence of impurities on its fidelity. We further show that the proposed technique can allow control of energy transfer in completely disordered systems.
Felipe Herrera, Marina Litinskaya
We propose to use molecular picocavity ensembles as macroscopic coherent nonlinear optical devices enabled by nanoscale strong coupling. For a generic picocavity model that includes molecular and photonic disorder, we derive theoretical performance bounds for coherent cross-phase modulation signals using weak classical fields of different frequencies. We show that strong coupling of the picocavity {\it vacua} with a specific vibronic sideband in the molecular emission spectrum results in a significant variation of the effective refractive index of the metamaterial relative to a molecule-free scenario, due to a vacuum-induced Autler-Townes effect. For a realistic molecular disorder model, we demonstrate that cross-phase modulation of optical fields as weak as 10 kW/cm$^2$ is feasible using dilute ensembles of molecular picocavities at room temperature, provided that the confined vacuum is not resonantly driven by the external probe field}. Our work paves the way for the development of plasmonic metamaterials that exploit strong coupling for optical state preparation and quantum control.
Fumika Suzuki, Marina Litinskaya, William G. Unruh
Jan 17, 2017·quant-ph·PDF We study scattering of a composite quasiparticle, which possesses a degree of freedom corresponding to relative separation between two bound excitations, by a delta-like impurity potential on a one-dimensional discrete lattice. Firstly, we show that, due to specific properties of their dispersion, lattice excitations bind to impurities with both negative and positive potentials. We demonstrate that the finite size of the composite excitation leads to formation of multiple excitation-impurity bound states. The number and the degree of localization of these bound states depend on the signs and relative magnitudes of the impurity potential and the binding strength of two quasiparticles. We also report the existence of excitation-impurity bound states whose energies are located in the continuum band. Secondly, we study a change in the entanglement between the centre of mass and relative coordinate degrees of freedom of a biexciton wave packet during single impurity scattering and decoherence caused by it. For a composite quasiparticle on a lattice, the entanglement between its relative and centre of mass coordinate degrees of freedom arises naturally due to inseparability of the two-particle Hamiltonian. One of the main focuses of our study is to investigate how this inseparability affects the creation of the biexciton-impurity bound states and the entanglement dynamics.
Marina Litinskaya, Felipe Herrera
We propose a cavity QED scheme to enable cross-phase modulation between two arbitrarily weak classical fields in the optical domain, using organic molecular photoswitches as a disordered intracavity nonlinear medium. We show that a long-lived vibrational Raman coherence between the $cis$ and $trans$ isomer states of the photoswitch can be exploited to establish the phenomenon of vacuum-induced transparency (VIT) in high-quality microcavities. We exploit this result to derive an expression for the cross-phase modulation signal and demonstrate that it is possible to surpass the detection limit imposed by absorption losses, even in the presence of strong natural energetic and orientational disorder in the medium. Possible applications of the scheme include the development of organic nanophotonic devices for all-optical switching with low photon numbers.