Speaker
Description
One of the most exciting directions associated with the rapid advance of quantum science is the possibility to utilize synthetic quantum systems to realize and explore strongly correlated quantum phenomena. Generally, however, this regime remains challenging to access with quantum atom-light interfaces for two reasons. First, such systems still suffer from significant dissipation, particularly at the level of individual quanta, in the form of spontaneous emission of light into unwanted directions. Second, there is a prevailing strategy to reduce the effects of dissipation, by encoding phenomena within the collective optical response of many atoms, which improves atom-light interaction efficiencies. Unfortunately, this same collective response typically results in collective spin or mean-field descriptions of the physics, which is incompatible with most known strongly correlated phenomena in physics. Within this context, atom arrays with sub-wavelength lattice constant constitute an exciting opportunity to break beyond these boundaries. In these systems, wave interference effects in light emission are strongly enhanced, resulting in highly correlated dissipation. This gives rise to the phenomenon of subradiance, where certain classes of states are highly protected from emission, and which provides a potential mechanism to evade mean-field behavior. Here, we describe our ongoing efforts to identify and understand paradigms by which strongly correlated and emergent phenomena might arise from the natural resources of long-range interactions and collective dissipation in quantum optical arrays. We will focus on an example involving the realization of quantum spin liquids in Rydberg atom arrays interfaced with high-finesse cavities, where the long-range interactions are used to project atoms into resonating valence bond states that are dark to cavity-mediated photon emission.
