A strongly interacting photonic quantum walk using single atom beam splitters

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel strongly interacting photonic quantum walk platform using single atom beam splitters, enabling exploration of correlated many-body light states with tunable statistics and state sorting.

Contribution

It introduces a new strongly interacting discrete-time photonic quantum walk scheme utilizing single atom beam splitters, allowing for tunable boson-fermion statistics and state sorting.

Findings

Demonstrates strongly-correlated photon transport.

Shows tunable boson-like or fermion-like statistics.

Proposes experimental realization with synthetic dimensions.

Abstract

Photonics provide an efficient way to implement quantum walks, the quantum analogue of classical random walk that demonstrates rich physics with potential applications. However, most photonic quantum walks do not involve photon interactions, which limits their potential to explore strongly-correlated many-body physics of light. We propose a strongly interacting discrete-time photonic quantum walk using a network of single atom beamsplitters. We calculate output statistics of the quantum walk for the case of two photons, which reveals the strongly-correlated transport of photons. Particularly, the walk can exhibit either boson-like or fermion-like statistics which is tunable by post-selecting the two-photon detection time interval. Also, the walk can sort different types of two-photon bound states into distinct pairs of output ports under certain conditions. These unique phenomena show that our quantum walk is an intriguing platform to explore strongly-correlated quantum many-body states of light. Finally, we propose an experimental realization based on time-multiplexed synthetic dimensions.