Tunable three-body loss in a nonlinear Rydberg medium

Abstract

Long-range Rydberg interactions, in combination with electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), give rise to strongly interacting photons where the strength, sign, and form of the interactions are widely tunable and controllable. Such control can be applied to both coherent and dissipative interactions, which provides the potential to generate novel few-photon states. Recently it has been shown that Rydberg-EIT is a rare system in which three-body interactions can be as strong or stronger than two-body interactions. In this work, we study a three-body scattering loss for Rydberg-EIT in a wide regime of single and two-photon detunings. Our numerical simulations of the full three-body wavefunction and analytical estimates based on Fermi's Golden Rule strongly suggest that the observed features in the outgoing photonic correlations are caused by the resonant enhancement of the three-body losses.