Coherent control of subradiant excitations in atomic rings

Abstract

Collective excitations in ordered subwavelength atomic arrays can exhibit strongly suppressed radiative decay due to interference between light scattered by neighboring emitters. These so-called subradiant states make these systems a promising platform for storing and manipulating photonic excitations. The external geometry of the array, combined with dynamical control of the atomic dipole orientation, enables localized trapping and coherent transport of these subradiant excitations. Here, we theoretically demonstrate these capabilities in ring-shaped atomic arrays. Specifically, we show adiabatic transport of a localized excitation around a single ring, coherent transfer of a single excitation between two neighboring rings with geometry-controlled selectivity, and interaction-induced conditional phase shifts between two simultaneously trapped excitations in neighboring rings. The latter can be interpreted as effective controlled-phase operations between stored excitations. Together, these results demonstrate the potential of ordered atomic arrays as a platform for coherent photonic quantum information processing with dissipation-protected collective excitations.