Inelastic scattering of a photon by a quantum phase-slip

Spontaneous decay of a single photon is a notoriously inefficient process in nature irrespective of the frequency range. We report that a quantum phase-slip fluctuation in high-impedance superconducting waveguides can split a single incident microwave photon into a large number of lower-energy photo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-03
Main Authors: Kuzmin, Roman, Grabon, Nicholas, Mehta, Nitish, Burshtein, Amir, Goldstein, Moshe, Houzet, Manuel, Glazman, Leonid I, Manucharyan, Vladimir E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Circuits
Condensed matter physics
Critical phenomena
Decay rate
Josephson junctions
Linearity
Mapping
Maxwell's equations
Photons
Quantum electrodynamics
Quantum optics
Quantum theory
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Summary:Spontaneous decay of a single photon is a notoriously inefficient process in nature irrespective of the frequency range. We report that a quantum phase-slip fluctuation in high-impedance superconducting waveguides can split a single incident microwave photon into a large number of lower-energy photons with a near unit probability. The underlying inelastic photon-photon interaction has no analogs in non-linear optics. Instead, the measured decay rates are explained without adjustable parameters in the framework of a new model of a quantum impurity in a Luttinger liquid. Our result connects circuit quantum electrodynamics to critical phenomena in two-dimensional boundary quantum field theories, important in the physics of strongly-correlated systems. The photon lifetime data represents a rare example of verified and useful quantum many-body simulation.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2010.02099