Interacting Floquet polaritons

Abstract

Ordinarily, photons do not interact with one another. However, atoms can be used to mediate photonic interactions, raising the prospect of forming synthetic materials and quantum information systems from photons. One promising approach uses electromagnetically-induced transparency with highly-excited Rydberg atoms to generate strong photonic interactions. Adding an optical cavity shapes the available modes and forms strongly-interacting polaritons with enhanced light-matter coupling. However, since every atom of the same species is identical, the atomic transitions available are only those prescribed by nature. This inflexibility severely limits their utility for mediating the formation of photonic materials in cavities, as the resonator mode spectrum is typically poorly matched to the atomic spectrum. Here we use Floquet engineering to redesign the spectrum of Rubidium and make it compatible with the spectrum of a cavity, in order to explore strongly interacting polaritons in a customized space. We show that periodically modulating the energy of an atomic level redistributes its spectral weight into lifetime-limited bands separated by multiples of the modulation frequency. Simultaneously generating bands resonant with two chosen spatial modes of an optical cavity supports "Floquet polaritons" in both modes. In the presence of Rydberg dressing, we find that these polaritons interact strongly. Floquet polaritons thus provide a promising new path to quantum information technologies such as multimode photon-by-photon switching, as well as to ordered states of strongly-correlated photons, including crystals and topological fluids.