*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
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 by less than the blockade radius resulting in a strong anti-correlation of two photons given by an avoided volume. For large separations the repulsive long-range interaction between the Rydberg atoms induces repulsive interactions between the photons leading to quasi-crystalline states of photons. Confining the system to one dimension the low-energy physics of the excitations can be described in terms of a Luttinger Liquid.
Using DMRG simulations the Luttinger K-parameter is calculated and conditions on the formation of long-range ordered states are derived. 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 long-range correlations in future experiments will be discussed.
