Picky light – how light ignores interactions of matter
In their recent work, Andreas Schellenberger and Kai Phillip Schmidt investigate correlated light-matter quantum systems introducing additional matter-matter interactions. Their key finding is that the matter-matter interactions do not play a role in the emerging light-matter physics at low energies for the investigated case of macroscopic systems and small light-matter couplings.
On the one hand this finding enabled them to solve these systems analytically, providing rich insight into the energy spectrum and corresponding quantum states of the models. On the other hand it also indicates that no fundamentally new physics occurs in this class of unfrustrated systems. Instead, the observed behaviour in the studied phases is still like the paradigmatic Dicke model, which is well known in quantum optics and contains no matter-matter interactions.
The overarching goal of this and related works in the team of Kai Phillip Schmidt within the collaborative research center QuCoLiMa is to investigate the collective behaviour of coupled light-matter systems with a strongly correlated matter part and find new emerging behaviour that can only be understood by the interplay of matter-matter and light-matter interactions.
For more information, see the publication in SciPost Physics Core:
(Almost) everything is a Dicke model – Mapping non-superradiant correlated light-matter systems to the exactly solvable Dicke model
Andreas Schellenberger, Kai Phillip Schmidt
SciPost Phys. Core 7, 038 (2024)
This work was also featured as a Research Spotlight of the FAU Profile Center Light.Matter.QuantumTechnologies at this site.