QSE Quantum Seminar - Emission of (giant) atoms under a synthetic electric field

Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Francesco Ciccarello from University of Palermo, who will give the talk "Emission of (giant) atoms under a synthetic electric field" on Thursday January 23^rd. 
Location: BS 260.

Pizzas will be available before the seminar at 12:00. All PhDs, postdocs, students, and PIs are welcome to join us.

TITLE: Emission of (giant) atoms under a synthetic electric field

ABSTRACT:

Giant atoms allow for two major effects: engineered coupling to field modes and time-delayed non-Markovian dynamics. Here, we will discuss two novel paradigms for these phenomena, which both arise in a photonic lattice (implemented through a 1D or 2D coupled-cavity array) with an applied synthetic electric field. We first consider a 2D lattice implementing photonic graphene with an open gap. We propose that relying on giant atoms one can combine ideas imported from valleytronics [1] with quantum optics in order to produce chiral light orthogonal to the electric field direction without the need for breaking time reversal symmetry of the lattice [2]. We then consider a simple 1D array with an applied electric field, where Bloch oscillations are known to happen. We show that an atom emitting into such a lattice generally undergoes a non-Markovian dynamics. In a suitable regime, this resembles the dynamics of an atom in a long multi-mode perfect cavity (despite no true mirrors are present) with the role of the photon time delay embodied by the Bloch oscillations period [3].

[1] J. R. Schaibley et al., Valleytronics in 2D materials, Nature Reviews Materials 1, 1 (2016).
[2] M. Pinto, G. L. Sferrazza, D. De Bernardis, F. Ciccarello, in preparation (2024).
[3] M. Pinto, G. L. Sferrazza, D. De Bernardis, F. Ciccarello, in preparation (2024).

BIO:

Francesco Ciccarello is an Associate Professor at University of Palermo, Italy, and a member of NEST (National Enterprise for nanoScience and nanoTechnology), Cnr Nano, Pisa, Italy. In 2017, He was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship which was spent at Duke University, USA. Formerly, he was a postdoc at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa and a visiting fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
He is an editor at Quantum and Journal of the Optical Society of America B (JOSA B). His research deals with quantum optics, open quantum systems and condensed matter systems. In the last years, he has worked mostly on waveguide QED, where he is the founder and main organiser of a series of dedicated workshops.