Jon Simon

All Publications

• Disorder-assisted assembly of strongly correlated fluids of light. Nature Saxberg, B., Vrajitoarea, A., Roberts, G., Panetta, M. G., Simon, J., Schuster, D. I. 2022; 612 (7940): 435-441

  Abstract

  Guiding many-body systems to desired states is a central challenge of modern quantum science, with applications from quantum computation1,2 to many-body physics3 and quantum-enhanced metrology4. Approaches to solving this problem include step-by-step assembly5,6, reservoir engineering to irreversibly pump towards a target state7,8 and adiabatic evolution from a known initial state9,10. Here we construct low-entropy quantum fluids of light in a Bose-Hubbard circuit by combining particle-by-particle assembly and adiabatic preparation. We inject individual photons into a disordered lattice for which the eigenstates are known and localized, then adiabatically remove this disorder, enabling quantum fluctuations to melt the photons into a fluid. Using our platform11, we first benchmark this lattice melting technique by building and characterizing arbitrary single-particle-in-a-box states, then assemble multiparticle strongly correlated fluids. Intersite entanglement measurements performed through single-site tomography indicate that the particles in the fluid delocalize, whereas two-body density correlation measurements demonstrate that they also avoid one another, revealing Friedel oscillations characteristic of a Tonks-Girardeau gas12,13. This work opens new possibilities for the preparation of topological and otherwise exotic phases of synthetic matter3,14,15.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-022-05357-x

  View details for PubMedID 36517711

• Chiral cavity quantum electrodynamics NATURE PHYSICS Owens, J., Panetta, M. G., Saxberg, B., Roberts, G., Chakram, S., Ma, R., Vrajitoarea, A., Simon, J., Schuster, D. 2022; 18 (9): 1048-+

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41567-022-01671-3

  View details for Web of Science ID 000832510400002

• Observation of Laughlin states made of light NATURE Clark, L. W., Schine, N., Baum, C., Jia, N., Simon, J. 2020; 582 (7810): 41-+

  Abstract

  Much of the richness in nature emerges because simple constituents form an endless variety of ordered states1. Whereas many such states are fully characterized by symmetries2, interacting quantum systems can exhibit topological order and are instead characterized by intricate patterns of entanglement3,4. A paradigmatic example of topological order is the Laughlin state5, which minimizes the interaction energy of charged particles in a magnetic field and underlies the fractional quantum Hall effect6. Efforts have been made to enhance our understanding of topological order by forming Laughlin states in synthetic systems of ultracold atoms7,8 or photons9-11. Nonetheless, electron gases remain the only systems in which such topological states have been definitively observed6,12-14. Here we create Laughlin-ordered photon pairs using a gas of strongly interacting, lowest-Landau-level polaritons as a photon collider. Initially uncorrelated photons enter a cavity and hybridize with atomic Rydberg excitations to form polaritons15-17, quasiparticles that here behave like electrons in the lowest Landau level owing to a synthetic magnetic field created by Floquet engineering18 a twisted cavity11,19 and by Rydberg-mediated interactions between them16,17,20,21. Polariton pairs collide and self-organize to avoid each other while conserving angular momentum. Our finite-lifetime polaritons only weakly prefer such organization. Therefore, we harness the unique tunability of Floquet polaritons to distil high-fidelity Laughlin states of photons outside the cavity. Particle-resolved measurements show that these photons avoid each other and exhibit angular momentum correlations, the hallmarks of Laughlin physics. This work provides broad prospects for the study of topological quantum light22.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-020-2318-5

  View details for Web of Science ID 000562462300001

  View details for PubMedID 32494082

• Photonic materials in circuit quantum electrodynamics NATURE PHYSICS Carusotto, I., Houck, A. A., Kollar, A. J., Roushan, P., Schuster, D. I., Simon, J. 2020; 16 (3): 268-279

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41567-020-0815-y

  View details for Web of Science ID 000517742600004

• Interacting Floquet polaritons NATURE Clark, L. W., Jia, N., Schine, N., Baum, C., Georgakopoulos, A., Simon, J. 2019; 571 (7766): 532-+

  Abstract

  Ordinarily, photons do not interact with one another. However, atoms can be used to mediate photonic interactions1,2, raising the prospect of forming synthetic materials3 and quantum information systems4-7 from photons. One promising approach combines highly excited Rydberg atoms8-12 with the enhanced light-matter coupling of an optical cavity to convert photons into strongly interacting polaritons13-15. However, quantum materials made of optical photons have not yet been realized, because the experimental challenge of coupling a suitable atomic sample with a degenerate cavity has constrained cavity polaritons to a single spatial mode that is resonant with an atomic transition. Here we use Floquet engineering16,17-the periodic modulation of a quantum system-to enable strongly interacting polaritons to access multiple spatial modes of an optical cavity. First, we show that periodically modulating an excited state of rubidium splits its spectral weight to generate new lines-beyond those that are ordinarily characteristic of the atom-separated by multiples of the modulation frequency. Second, we use this capability to simultaneously generate spectral lines that are resonant with two chosen spatial modes of a non-degenerate optical cavity, enabling what we name 'Floquet polaritons' to exist in both modes. Because both spectral lines correspond to the same Floquet-engineered atomic state, adding a single-frequency field is sufficient to couple both modes to a Rydberg excitation. We demonstrate that the resulting polaritons interact strongly in both cavity modes simultaneously. The production of Floquet polaritons provides a promising new route to the realization of ordered states of strongly correlated photons, including crystals and topological fluids, as well as quantum information technologies such as multimode photon-by-photon switching.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-1354-5

  View details for Web of Science ID 000477016700064

  View details for PubMedID 31270460

• Topological photonics REVIEWS OF MODERN PHYSICS Ozawa, T., Price, H. M., Amo, A., Goldman, N., Hafezi, M., Lu, L., Rechtsman, M. C., Schuster, D., Simon, J., Zilberberg, O., Carusotto, I. 2019; 91 (1)

  View details for DOI 10.1103/RevModPhys.91.015006

  View details for Web of Science ID 000462967000002

• A dissipatively stabilized Mott insulator of photons NATURE Ma, R., Saxberg, B., Owens, C., Leung, N., Lu, Y., Simon, J., Schuster, D. I. 2019; 566 (7742): 51-57

  Abstract

  Superconducting circuits are a competitive platform for quantum computation because they offer controllability, long coherence times and strong interactions-properties that are essential for the study of quantum materials comprising microwave photons. However, intrinsic photon losses in these circuits hinder the realization of quantum many-body phases. Here we use superconducting circuits to explore strongly correlated quantum matter by building a Bose-Hubbard lattice for photons in the strongly interacting regime. We develop a versatile method for dissipative preparation of incompressible many-body phases through reservoir engineering and apply it to our system to stabilize a Mott insulator of photons against losses. Site- and time-resolved readout of the lattice allows us to investigate the microscopic details of the thermalization process through the dynamics of defect propagation and removal in the Mott phase. Our experiments demonstrate the power of superconducting circuits for studying strongly correlated matter in both coherent and engineered dissipative settings. In conjunction with recently demonstrated superconducting microwave Chern insulators, we expect that our approach will enable the exploration of topologically ordered phases of matter.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-0897-9

  View details for Web of Science ID 000457981800038

  View details for PubMedID 30728523

• Electromagnetic and gravitational responses of photonic Landau levels NATURE Schine, N., Chalupnik, M., Can, T., Gromov, A., Simon, J. 2019; 565 (7738): 173-+

  Abstract

  Topology has recently become a focus in condensed matter physics, arising in the context of the quantum Hall effect and topological insulators. In both of these cases, the topology of the system is defined through bulk properties ('topological invariants') but detected through surface properties. Here we measure three topological invariants of a quantum Hall material-photonic Landau levels in curved space-through local electromagnetic and gravitational responses of the bulk material. Viewing the material as a many-port circulator, the Chern number (a topological invariant) manifests as spatial winding of the phase of the circulator. The accumulation of particles near points of high spatial curvature and the moment of inertia of the resultant particle density distribution quantify two additional topological invariants-the mean orbital spin and the chiral central charge. We find that these invariants converge to their global values when probed over increasing length scales (several magnetic lengths), consistent with the intuition that the bulk and edges of a system are distinguishable only for sufficiently large samples (larger than roughly one magnetic length). Our experiments are enabled by applying quantum optics tools to synthetic topological matter (here twisted optical resonators). Combined with advances in Rydberg-mediated photon collisions, our work will enable precision characterization of topological matter in photon fluids.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-018-0817-4

  View details for Web of Science ID 000455231000034

  View details for PubMedID 30626945

• Probing the Berry curvature and Fermi arcs of a Weyl circuit PHYSICAL REVIEW B Lu, Y., Jia, N., Su, L., Owens, C., Juzeliunas, G., Schuster, D., Simon, J. 2019; 99 (2)

  View details for DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.99.020302

  View details for Web of Science ID 000455053300001

• A strongly interacting polaritonic quantum dot NATURE PHYSICS Jia, N., Schine, N., Georgakopoulos, A., Ryou, A., Clark, L. W., Sommer, A., Simon, J. 2018; 14 (6): 550-554

  View details for DOI 10.1038/s41567-018-0071-6

  View details for Web of Science ID 000434093800016

• Synthetic Landau levels for photons NATURE Schine, N., Ryou, A., Gromov, A., Sommer, A., Simon, J. 2016; 534 (7609): 671-675

  Abstract

  Synthetic photonic materials are an emerging platform for exploring the interface between microscopic quantum dynamics and macroscopic material properties. Photons experiencing a Lorentz force develop handedness, providing opportunities to study quantum Hall physics and topological quantum science. Here we present an experimental realization of a magnetic field for continuum photons. We trap optical photons in a multimode ring resonator to make a two-dimensional gas of massive bosons, and then employ a non-planar geometry to induce an image rotation on each round-trip. This results in photonic Coriolis/Lorentz and centrifugal forces and so realizes the Fock–Darwin Hamiltonian for photons in a magnetic field and harmonic trap. Using spatial- and energy-resolved spectroscopy, we track the resulting photonic eigenstates as radial trapping is reduced, finally observing a photonic Landau level at degeneracy. To circumvent the challenge of trap instability at the centrifugal limit, we constrain the photons to move on a cone. Spectroscopic probes demonstrate flat space (zero curvature) away from the cone tip. At the cone tip, we observe that spatial curvature increases the local density of states, and we measure fractional state number excess consistent with the Wen–Zee theory, providing an experimental test of this theory of electrons in both a magnetic field and curved space. This work opens the door to exploration of the interplay of geometry and topology, and in conjunction with Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency, enables studies of photonic fractional quantum Hall fluids and direct detection of anyons.

  View details for DOI 10.1038/nature17943

  View details for Web of Science ID 000378676000033

  View details for PubMedID 27281214