All Abstracts | Poster Abstracts | Talk Abstracts

Strongly interacting photons

Vladan Vuletic, MIT

(Session 3 : Thursday from 1:30pm - 2:15pm)

I discuss two experimental systems where individual photons interact strongly with one another. One is a cavity QED system with an atomic ensemble inside an optical resonator where one photon stored in the ensemble in the form of a collective excitation can switch the transmission of more than one photon through the cavity. The other is a free-space system where photons traveling slowly in an atomic ensemble interact with one another via the coupling to strongly mutually interacting Rydberg states. We observe attractive forces between individual photons leading to the formation of a two-photon bound state, and measure a conditional two-photon phase shift exceeding pi/4.