https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2020-100521-0
Regular Article
Synthetic mean-field interactions in photonic lattices★
1
SUPA, Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
2
Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, 01187 Dresden, Germany
3
Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), 91058 Erlangen, Germany
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Received:
24
October
2019
Received in final form:
5
February
2020
Published online:
1
May
2020
Abstract
Photonic lattices are usually considered to be limited by their lack of methods to include interactions. We address this issue by introducing mean-field interactions through optical components which are external to the photonic lattice. The proposed technique to realise mean-field interacting photonic lattices relies on a Suzuki-Trotter decomposition of the unitary evolution for the full Hamiltonian. The technique realises the dynamics in an analogous way to that of a step-wise numerical implementation of quantum dynamics, in the spirit of digital quantum simulation. It is a very versatile technique which allows for the emulation of interactions that do not only depend on inter-particle separations or do not decay with particle separation. We detail the proposed experimental scheme and consider two examples of interacting phenomena, self-trapping and the decay of Bloch oscillations, that are observable with the proposed technique.
Contribution to the Topical Issue “Topological Ultracold Atoms and Photonic Systems” edited by G. Juzeliūnas, R. Ma, Y.-J. Lin and T. Calarco.
© The Author(s) 2020. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
