Quantum electrodynamics without photons

Decay of a particle into more particles is a common manifestation of interactions, be it a Higgs boson at LHC or a Fermi-liquid quasiparticle (quasi-electron) in metals at low temperatures. In a lossless but non-linear electromagnetic medium, even a single photon would eventually decay by down-converting into two or more lower-frequency photons. Can we still define the notion of a photon when its interaction-induced lifetime becomes too short to even observe it? In this lecture we will show how advances in superconducting qubit technology enable experiments with such an extreme quantum electrodynamics scenario, at least in 1+1 dimensions.

Bio
Vladimir Manucharyan was born in Baku (USSR) in 1983. He obtained B.S. degree from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Ph.D. from Yale University. In 2010 he was elected into the Society of Fellows of Harvard University as a Junior Fellow. In 2014 he started his own laboratory at the University of Maryland and moved to EPFL in 2022. Vladimir's research interests are mainly in the area of quantum computing with superconducting devices.