Resonant enhancement of three-body loss between strongly interacting photons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dissipative three-body interactions among Rydberg polaritons can be universally enhanced, revealing their impact on transmission in cavity systems and opening pathways for exploring exotic quantum phases.

Contribution

It introduces a renormalization group approach to analyze dissipative three-body forces, highlighting their universal enhancement and experimental implications.

Findings

Dissipative three-body forces can be universally enhanced in Rydberg polaritons.

The shape and strength of these forces influence cavity transmission.

The study links three-body physics to observable experimental signatures.

Abstract

Rydberg polaritons provide an example of a rare type of system where three-body interactions can be as strong or even stronger than two-body interactions. The three-body interactions can be either dispersive or dissipative, with both types possibly giving rise to exotic, strongly-interacting, and topological phases of matter. Despite past theoretical and experimental studies of the regime with dispersive interaction, the dissipative regime is still mostly unexplored. Using a renormalization group technique to solve the three-body Schr\"odinger equation, we show how the shape and strength of dissipative three-body forces can be universally enhanced for Rydberg polaritons. We demonstrate how these interactions relate to the transmission through a single-mode cavity, which can be used as a probe of the three-body physics in current experiments.