Inelastic photon scattering via the intracavity Rydberg blockade

TL;DR

This paper investigates inelastic photon scattering in a cavity Rydberg-EIT system using a non-equilibrium quantum field approach, revealing new polaritonic resonance structures and extending understanding beyond low-excitation regimes.

Contribution

It provides analytic expressions for cavity transmission spectra at higher excitations, advancing the theoretical modeling of strongly correlated Rydberg media.

Findings

Identification of a new polaritonic resonance structure

Analytic expressions valid for higher excitation numbers

Enhanced understanding of inelastic scattering processes

Abstract

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a ladder system involving a Rydberg level is known to yield giant optical nonlinearities for the probe field, even in the few-photon regime. This enhancement is due to the strong dipole-dipole interactions between Rydberg atoms and the resulting excitation blockade phenomenon. In order to study such highly correlated media, ad hoc models or low-excitation assumptions are generally used to tackle their dynamical response to optical fields. Here, we study the behaviour of a cavity Rydberg-EIT setup in the non-equilibrium quantum field formalism, and we obtain analytic expressions for elastic and inelastic components of the cavity transmission spectrum, valid up to higher excitation numbers than previously achieved. This allows us to identify and interpret a polaritonic resonance structure, to our knowledge unreported so far.