Photon-mediated correlated hopping in a synthetic ladder

Abstract

We propose a different direction in quantum simulation that uses multilevel atoms in an optical cavity as a toolbox to engineer different types of bosonic models featuring correlated hopping processes in a synthetic ladder spanned by atomic ground states. The underlying mechanisms responsible for correlated hopping are collective cavity-mediated interactions that dress a manifold of excited levels in the far-detuned limit. By weakly coupling the ground-state levels to these dressed states using two laser drives with appropriate detunings, one can engineer correlated hopping processes while suppressing undesired single-particle and collective shifts of the ground-state levels. We discuss the rich many-body dynamics that can be realized in the synthetic ladder including pair production processes, chiral transport, and light-cone correlation spreading. The latter illustrates that an effective notion of locality can be engineered in a system with fully collective interactions.