Excitation injector in an atomic chain: long-ranged transport and efficiency amplification

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that displacing atoms in a quantum emitter chain significantly enhances energy transport efficiency and range, due to an elementary excitation injector effect, with robustness up to chains of seven atoms.

Contribution

It reveals a novel excitation injector mechanism in atomic chains that amplifies energy transport efficiency and extends transport range, surpassing previous limitations.

Findings

Efficiency amplification of at least 1000% in atomic chains.

Transport range can be up to 20 times longer than regular chains.

Robust amplification effect persists in chains up to 7 atoms.

Abstract

We investigate the transport of energy in a linear chain of two-level quantum emitters ("atoms") weakly coupled to a blackbody radiation bath. We show that, simply by displacing one or more atoms from their regular-chain positions, the efficiency of the energy transport can be considerably amplified of at least one order of magnitude. Besides, in configurations providing an efficiency greater than $100\%$ , the distance between the two last atoms of the chain can be up to 20 times larger than the one in the regular chain, thus achieving a much longer-range energy transport. By performing both a stationary and time-dependent analysis, we ascribe this effect to an elementary block of three atoms, playing the role of excitation injector from the blackbody bath to the extraction site. By considering chains with up to 7 atoms, we also show that the amplification is robust and can be further enhanced up to $1400\%$.