University of Michigan,USA
Prof. Franco Nori is a RIKEN Chief Scientist, heading the “Theoretical Quantum Physics Laboratory”. His research is in theoretical condensed matter physics and quantum information processing. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the UK’s Institute of Physics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an Elected Member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Swedish Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, in Gothenburg, Sweden.
In quantum optics, atoms are usually approximated as point-like compared to the wavelength of the light they interact with. However, recent advances in experiments with artificial atoms built from superconducting circuits have shown that this assumption can be violated. Instead, these artificial atoms can couple to an electromagnetic field in a waveguide at multiple points, which are spaced wavelength distances apart. Such systems are called giant atoms. They have attracted increasing interest in the past few years (e.g., see the review in [1]), in particular because it turns out that the interference effects due to the multiple coupling points allow giant atoms to interact with each other through the waveguide without losing energy into the waveguide (theory in [2] and experiments in [3]). This talk will review some of these developments. Finally, we will also show how a giant atom coupled to a waveguide with varying impedance can give rise to chiral bound states [4].
[1] A.F. Kockum, Quantum optics with giant atoms -- the first five years, https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13012
[2] A.F. Kockum, G. Johansson, F. Nori, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 140404 (2018)
[3] B. Kannan, M. J. Ruckriegel, D. L. Campbell, A. F. Kockum, J. Braumüller, D. K. Kim, M. Kjaergaard, P. Krantz, A. Melville, B. M. Niedzielski, A. Vepsäläinen, R. Winik, J. L. Yoder, F. Nori, T. P. Orlando, S. Gustavsson, and W. D. Oliver, Nature 583, pp. 775 (2020)
[4] X. Wang, T. Liu, A.F. Kockum, H.R. Li, F. Nori, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 043602 (2021). [PDF]