Single-photon nonreciprocal excitation transfer with non-Markovian retarded effects

Lei Du, Mao-Rui Cai, Jin-Hui Wu, Zhihai Wang, and Yong Li
Phys. Rev. A 103, 053701 – Published 4 May 2021

Abstract

We study at the single-photon level the nonreciprocal excitation transfer between emitters coupled with a common waveguide. Non-Markovian retarded effects are taken into account due to the large separation distance between different emitter-waveguide coupling ports. It is shown that the excitation transfer between the emitters of a small-atom dimer can be obviously nonreciprocal by introducing between them a coherent coupling channel with nontrivial coupling phase. We prove that for dimer models the nonreciprocity cannot coexist with the decoherence-free giant-atom structure although the latter markedly lengthens the lifetime of the emitters. In view of this, we further propose a giant-atom trimer which supports both nonreciprocal transfer (directional circulation) of the excitation and greatly lengthened lifetime. Such a trimer model also exhibits incommensurate emitter-waveguide entanglement for different initial states in which case the excitation transfer is, however. reciprocal. We believe that the proposals in this paper are of potential applications in large-scale quantum networks and quantum information processing.

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  • Received 6 February 2021
  • Accepted 19 April 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.103.053701

©2021 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Lei Du1, Mao-Rui Cai1, Jin-Hui Wu2, Zhihai Wang2, and Yong Li1,2,3,*

  • 1Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing 100193, China
  • 2Center for Quantum Sciences and School of Physics, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China
  • 3Synergetic Innovation Center for Quantum Effects and Applications, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China

  • *liyong@csrc.ac.cn

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Vol. 103, Iss. 5 — May 2021

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