Long-range four-body interactions in structured nonlinear photonic waveguides

Abstract

Multiphoton dynamics beyond linear optical materials are of significant fundamental and technological importance in quantum information processing. However, it remains largely unexplored in nonlinear waveguide QED. In this work, we theoretically propose a structured nonlinear waveguide in the presence of staggered photon-photon interactions, which supports two branches of gaped bands for doublons (i.e., spatially bound-photon-pair states). In contrast to linear waveguide QED systems, we identify two important contributions to its dynamical evolution, i.e., single-photon bound states (SPBSs) and doublon bound states (DBSs). Most remarkably, the nonlinear waveguide can mediate the long-range four-body interactions between two emitter pairs, even in the presence of disturbance from SPBSs. By appropriately designing system's parameters, we can achieve high-fidelity four-body Rabi oscillations mediated only by virtual doublons in DBSs. Our findings pave the way for applying structured nonlinear waveguide QED in multi-body quantum information processing and quantum simulations among remote sites.