Further information
Selected Projects
Funding: ERC SIRPOL
Strongly interacting Rydberg polaritons
A fundamental property of optical photons is their extremely weak interaction, which can be ignored for all practical purposes and applications. This forms the basis for our understanding of light and is at the heart of the rich variety of tools available to manipulate and control optical beams. On the other hand, a controllable and strong interaction between individual photons would be ideal to generate non-classical states of light, prepare correlated quantum states of photons, and harvest quantum mechanics as a new resource for future technologies. Rydberg slow light polaritons have recently emerged as a promising candidate to reach this goal and first experiments have demonstrated a strong interaction between individual photons. The aim of this project is to develop and advance the research field of Rydberg slow light polaritons with the ultimate goal to generate strongly interacting quantum many-body states with photons.