Many-body braiding phases in a rotating strongly correlated photon gas

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates a rotating, strongly correlated photon gas in a cavity, demonstrating the creation and braiding of quasi-holes in a quantum Hall-like state, revealing many-body Berry phases through spectral shifts.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate and manipulate quasi-holes in a photon gas, providing a novel way to observe many-body topological phases in photonic systems.

Findings

Observation of Laughlin-like photon eigenstates as spectral resonances

Creation and braiding of quasi-holes in the photon gas

Detection of many-body Berry phase via spectral shifts

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of a rotating trapped photon gas where a Laguerre-Gauss laser pump with a non-zero orbital angular momentum is used to inject rotating photons into a cavity with strong optical nonlinearity. The Laughlin-like few-photon eigenstates appear as sharp resonances in the transmission spectra. Using additional localized repulsive potentials, quasi-holes can be created in the quantum Hall liquid of photons and then braided around in space: an unambiguous signature of the many-body Berry phase under exchange of two quasi-holes is observed as a spectral shift of the corresponding transmission resonance.