Quantum Optics Seminar by Heng Shen

Quantum optics with thermal atoms

In this talk, I shall briefly outline our efforts and progresses on the entanglement-enhanced quantum metrology and many-body physics in platforms of Rydberg atom array, trapped ions and NV centers. Then, I shall focus on recent work on room-temperature atoms in glass vapor. In particular, the “flying” atoms in the cell act as the information carrier of light through the EIT-based quantum memory process, giving rise to non-Hermitian optical Hamiltonian for spatially-channelized EIT (and associated spin waves) under dissipative coupling. We observed that the exceptional point of such Hamiltonian critically affects both the EIT resonance frequency and the quantum correlations between spatially separated laser beams. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the atomic-reservoir outside the EIT channels, as well as the laser beam array geometry and the multi-level atom-light interaction can be engineered for complex coupling, non-reciprocal light transport in classical and quantum regimes, novel quantum light sources. Finally, prospects of the current research will be discussed.

Biography:

Professor Heng Shen obtained his PhD degree in 2015 in Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. Afterwards, he moved to Innsbruck as a postdoctoral researcher working on quantum simulation based on trapped ions. In 2017, he received the Newton International Fellowship to move to Oxford University as a researcher assistant. In 2020, he joined the Shanxi University in China and is leading a team for trapped-ion and neutral atomic array platforms for quantum simulation and computation & quantum metrology.