Bonn 2025 – scientific programme

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SYAS: Awards Symposium

SYAS 1: Awards Symposium

SYAS 1.3: Prize Talk

Thursday, March 13, 2025, 15:50–16:30, HS 1+2

Controlling light by atoms and atoms by light: from dark-state polaritons to many-body spin physics — •Michael Fleischhauer — RPTU, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany — Laureate of the Herbert-Walther-Prize 2025

Tailored driving of multi-level atoms with laser light can form quantum oscillators with extraordinary properties, allowing e.g. to create lossless media with full control on photon propagation or spin ensembles with long-range dipole-dipole interactions. In the first part of the talk I will review the concept of dark-state polaritons emerging from hybridizing light with driven atomic dipoles. I will discuss its application to control light propagation, to build quantum memories for photons, and to create strong photon-photon interactions using Rydberg states of atoms. Due to their strong and long-range interaction, driven Rydberg atoms have become a versatile platform of their own to study the many-body dynamics of quantum spin systems, both in unitary and dissipative settings. In the second part of the talk I will examine the equilibrium and non-equilibrium physics of various such (open) spin models using driven Rydberg atoms. This ranges from the facilitation dynamics of Rydberg excitations in a gas, resembling epidemic models with an absorbing-state phase transition on a dynamical network, to the creation of topological spin liquids due to density-dependent transport processes associated with a gauge field, emerging from driving multiple Rydberg states.

Keywords: slow light; Rydberg blockade; Rydberg facilitation; dissipative spin models; spin liquids