Dressed bound states at chiral exceptional points

Abstract

Atom-photon dressed states are a basic concept of quantum optics. Here, we demonstrate that the non-Hermiticity of open cavity can be harnessed to form the dressed bound states (DBS) and identify two types of DBS, the vacancy-like DBS and Friedrich-Wintgen DBS, in a microring resonator operating at a chiral exceptional point. With the analytical DBS conditions, we show that the vacancy-like DBS occurs when an atom couples to the standing wave mode that is a node of photonic wave function, and thus is immune to the cavity dissipation and characterized by the null spectral density at cavity resonance. While the Friedrich-Wintgen DBS can be accessed by continuously tuning the system parameters, such as the atom-photon detuning, and evidenced by a vanishing Rabi peak in emission spectrum, an unusual feature in the strong-coupling anticrossing. We also demonstrate the quantum-optics applications of the proposed DBS. Our work exhibits the quantum states control through non-Hermiticity of open quantum system and presents a clear physical picture on DBS at chiral exceptional points, which holds great potential in building high-performance quantum devices for sensing, photon storage, and nonclassical light generation.