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arXiv · 2010.02099

Inelastic scattering of a photon by a quantum phase-slip

Roman Kuzmin·Nicholas Grabon·Nitish Mehta·Amir Burshtein·Moshe Goldstein·Manuel Houzet·Leonid I. Glazman·Vladimir E. Manucharyan
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Abstract

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.

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Roman Kuzmin, Nicholas Grabon, Nitish Mehta, Amir Burshtein, Moshe Goldstein, Manuel Houzet, Leonid I. Glazman, Vladimir E. Manucharyan. 2020-10-05. Inelastic scattering of a photon by a quantum phase-slip. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.126.197701

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