Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Engineering atom-light interactions in photonic crystal waveguides

Presenting Author: Alex Burgers, California Institute of Technology
Contributing Author(s): Lucas Peng, H. Jeff Kimble

Integrating cold atoms with nanophotonics enables the exploration of new paradigms in quantum optics and many body physics. Advanced fabrication capabilities for low-loss dielectric materials provide powerful tools to engineer band structure and light-matter couplings between photons and atoms. The current system at Caltech to explore such phenomena consists of a quasi-one-dimensional photonic crystal waveguide (PCW) whose band structure arises from periodic modulation of the dielectric structure. The waveguide design gives rise to stable trap sites for atoms at each unit cell of the crystal (150 sites for the 1D waveguide). Atoms localized in these traps will interact with one another via guided modes of the waveguide creating a versatile system that can be utilized for both quantum memories and quantum simulation. We have performed extensive trajectory simulations of atoms delivered by an optical lattice to the PCWs. The good correspondence between simulation and data enables us to understand the microscopic dynamics of atoms near the waveguide and introduce auxiliary GMs that perturb the atoms and reveal how they can be delivered to these GM trap regions. I will present recent efforts to achieve high fractional filling of trap sites within the PCW using the optical lattice delivery system and discuss future research goals.

Read this article online: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.07757.pdf

(Session 6 : Monday from 9:15am - 9:45am)