Collective Nuclear Polaritons with Coherent and Tunable Excitation Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces collective nuclear polaritons formed by coupling a thorium-229 nuclear ensemble with a vacuum-ultraviolet cavity mode, enabling tunable quantum storage and lifetime control through strong coupling and adiabatic conversion.

Contribution

It demonstrates the creation of nuclear polaritons with scalable coupling, tunable emission, and reversible quantum storage using cavity-mediated hybridization.

Findings

Observation of vacuum Rabi oscillations indicating strong coupling.

Achievement of superradiant emission with intensity scaling as N^2.

Tunable emission lifetime from seconds to milliseconds.

Abstract

We propose collective nuclear polaritons formed by hybridizing a 229Th nuclear ensemble with a vacuum-ultraviolet cavity mode generated via four-wave mixing, achieving a collective light-matter coupling that scales as $\sqrt{N}$. In the strong-coupling regime the system displays vacuum Rabi oscillations, indicating the hybridization between cavity photons and nuclear excitations. In the superradiant regime, the stored excitation is released in a cooperative burst with peak intensity scaling as $N^2$. The emission lifetime shrinks from thousands of seconds to the millisecond scale and remains tunable. Detuning sweeps across the polariton avoided crossing allow adiabatic conversion of the photonic excitation into a collective nuclear excitation, enabling reversible quantum storage. Our results demonstrate that cavity-mediated nuclear polaritons enable deterministic lifetime engineering and coherent quantum storage in nuclear systems.