title: Photon Devil's staircase: photon long-range repulsive interaction in lattices of coupled resonators with Rydberg atoms.
abstract: The realization of strong coherent interactions between individual photons is a long-standing goal in science and engineering. In this report, based on recent experimental setups, we derive a strong photon long-range repulsive interaction, by controlling the van der Waals repulsive force between Cesium Rydberg atoms located inside different cavities in extended Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard lattices. We also find novel quantum phases induced by this photon long-range repulsive interaction. For example, without photon hopping, a photon Devil's staircase, induced by the breaking of long-range translation symmetry, can emerge. If photon hopping occurs, we predict a photon-floating solid phase, due to the motion of particle- and hole-like defects. More importantly, for a large chemical potential in the resonant case, the photon hopping can be frozen even if the hopping term exists. We call this new phase the photon-frozen solid phase. In experiments, these predicted phases could be detected by measuring the number of polaritons via resonance fluorescence.
authors.affiliation: 1] State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Laser spectroscopy, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China [2] Institute of Theoretical Physics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yuanwei
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Laser spectroscopy, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Jingtao
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Theoretical Physics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
authors.forename: J-Q
authors.initials: JQ
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Laser spectroscopy, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Laser spectroscopy, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Gang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Laser spectroscopy, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Suotang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.affiliation: 1] Center for Emergent Matter Science, RIKEN, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0198, Japan [2] Physics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1040, USA.
authors.forename: Franco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Nori