Nonreciprocal and chiral single-photon scattering for giant atoms

TL;DR

This paper explores how giant atoms can exhibit nonreciprocal and chiral single-photon scattering, with potential applications in quantum routing and circulators, especially in non-Markovian regimes.

Contribution

It identifies conditions for nonreciprocal transmission in giant atoms and extends the study to multi-level systems with different waveguide couplings.

Findings

Nonreciprocal transmission requires external dissipation beyond phase breaking.

Unconventional revival peaks appear in non-Markovian reflection spectra.

Proposed structures enable high-efficiency photon routing and circulators.

Abstract

Quantum optics with giant atoms has provided a new paradigm to study photon scatterings. In this work, we investigate the nontrivial single-photon scattering properties of giant atoms being an effective platform to realize nonreciprocal and chiral quantum optics. For two-level giant atoms, we identify the condition for nonreciprocal transmission: the external atomic dissipation is further required other than the breaking of time-reversal symmetry by local coupling phases. Especially, in the non-Markovian regime, unconventional revival peaks periodically appear in the reflection spectrum. To explore more interesting scattering behaviors, we extend the two-level giant-atom system to {\Delta}-type and {\nabla}-type three-level giant atoms coupled to double waveguides with different physical mechanisms to realize nonreciprocal and chiral scatterings. Our proposed giant-atom structures have potential applications of high-efficiency targeted routers that can transport single photons to any desired port deterministically and circulators that can transport single photons between four ports in a cyclic way.