Hartmann, Michael

Date: Wednesday July 30, 2014
Time: 11:00
Place: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HPF G 6
Host: Milan Allan / Anna Hambitzer

Strongly Interacting Photons in Superconducting Circuit Networks

Michael Hartmann
TU Munich, Germany

Light consists of photons, mass-less particles that do not interact with one another. Strong interactions between light and matter in multiple nodes of a network of resonators may however enable us to drive photons into quantum mechanical states that to date have only been observed for massive interacting particles. Such resonator networks hence give rise to strongly correlated quantum many-body systems formed by photons. Interestingly, these may by studied in novel, largely unexplored non-equilibrium scenarios.

In this talk, I will present some of our recent approaches to this physics which consider networks of superconducting circuit cavities. A straightforward but very interesting way of operating these systems is in a driven dissipative regime where the inevitable loss of photons is constantly compensated by driving the structures with a coherent input.   This scenario gives rise to an interesting class of many-body systems where instead of the ground state one is interested in stationary states of the driven dissipative dynamics. Here I will discuss photon-photon correlations for some specific cases of this scenario.