Photon-mediated correlated hopping in a synthetic ladder

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quantum simulation approach using multilevel atoms in an optical cavity to engineer correlated hopping in a synthetic ladder, enabling exploration of complex many-body dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a new method to realize correlated hopping models in a synthetic ladder using cavity-mediated interactions and laser coupling, expanding quantum simulation capabilities.

Findings

Engineered correlated hopping processes in a synthetic atomic ladder.

Demonstrated potential for chiral transport and light-cone correlations.

Showed how locality can be effectively engineered in collective systems.

Abstract

We propose a new direction in quantum simulation that uses multilevel atoms in an optical cavity as a toolbox to engineer new types of bosonic models featuring correlated hopping processes in a synthetic ladder spanned by atomic ground states. The underlying mechanisms responsible for correlated hopping are collective cavity-mediated interactions that dress a manifold of excited levels in the far detuned limit. By weakly coupling the ground state levels to these dressed states using two laser drives with appropriate detunings, one can engineer correlated hopping processes while suppressing undesired single-particle and collective shifts of the ground state levels. We discuss the rich many-body dynamics that can be realized in the synthetic ladder including pair production processes, chiral transport and light-cone correlation spreading. The latter illustrates that an effective notion of locality can be engineered in a system with fully collective interactions.