OSC Colloquium: Kanu Sinha, "Atom-Photon Interactions in Nanoscale Quantum Systems & Waveguide QED"

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Sinha Colloquium

When

3:30 – 5 p.m., Sept. 12, 2024

Where

Title

Atom-Photon Interactions in Nanoscale Quantum Systems & Waveguide QED

Abstract

Interactions between atoms or atom-like emitters and electromagnetic fields are at the heart of nearly all quantum optical phenomena and quantum information applications. With growing efforts towards miniaturization -- both with the fundamental motivation to explore strong light-matter coupling regimes and the practical goal of making quantum devices more modular – understanding and controlling atom-field interactions at nanoscales becomes increasingly relevant. When interfacing atoms with surfaces of waveguides and photonic structures at nanoscales, quantum fluctuation phenomena, such as Casimir-Polder forces, surface-induced dissipation and decoherence, become an inevitable element of consideration. I will present an overview of various ways to engineer fluctuation-induced phenomena in nanoscale quantum optical systems.

Furthermore, when connecting multiple atoms at long distances, memory effects of the electromagnetic environment become pronounced in the presence retardation, necessitating a non-Markovian treatment of the system. I will discuss collective atom-field interactions in distant correlated emitters coupled via a waveguide. We demonstrate that such a system can exhibit surprisingly rich non-Markovian dynamics, with collective spontaneous emission rates exceeding those of Dicke superradiance (“superduperradiance”), formation of delocalized atom-photon bound states and directional routing of photons guided by atomic correlations. These results are pertinent to distributed quantum information protocols and ongoing experiments with waveguide-coupled quantum emitters.

Bio

Kanu Sinha is an Assistant Professor at the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at University of Arizona where she leads the Quantum Optics and Open Quantum Systems (QOOQS) group. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics at University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, and has held postdoctoral appointments at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck and the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL). She was subsequently an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, and an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University before starting her current position at UA. Her research is at the intersection of quantum optics, quantum information and open quantum systems – with a focus on quantum fluctuation phenomena, collective atom-field interactions and non-Markovian open quantum systems.

 

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Contacts

Daniel Soh, Associate Professor and Colloquium Chair