Overcoming the detrimental effect of disorder at the nanoscale is very hard since disorder induces localization and an exponential suppression of transport efficiency. Here we unveil novel and robust quantum transport regimes achievable in nanosystems by exploiting long-range hopping. We demonstrate that in a 1D disordered nanostructure in the presence of long-range hopping, transport efficiency, after decreasing exponentially with disorder at first, is then enhanced by disorder [disorder-enhanced transport (DET) regime] until, counterintuitively, it reaches a disorder-independent transport (DIT) regime, persisting over several orders of disorder magnitude in realistic systems. To enlighten the relevance of our results, we demonstrate that an ensemble of emitters in a cavity can be described by an effective long-range Hamiltonian. The specific case of a disordered molecular wire placed in an optical cavity is discussed, showing that the DIT and DET regimes can be reached with state-of-the-art experimental setups.
A standard model is suggested to explore correlation features of two spatially separated optomechanical cavities. The cavities are coupled through the photon-hopping process. In particular, we investigate the generation of entanglement between mechanical resonators in the strong coupling regime and the two cavities are assumed to be driven by a coherent laser field. In order to quantify entanglement we use the logarithmic negativity. The analytical solutions are presented for the system in a parameter regime very close to the current experimental results. We show that in the presence of the ph…
We study the effects of long-range hopping and long-range inter-particle interactions on quantum walk of hard-core bosons in ideal and disordered one-dimensional lattices. We find that the range of hopping has a much more significant effect on the particle correlation dynamics than the range of interactions. We illustrate that long-range hopping makes the correlation diagrams asymmetric with respect to the sign of the interaction and examine the relative role of repulsive and attractive interactions on the dynamics of scattering by isolated impurities and Anderson localization in dis- ordered …
We study the dynamics of single photonic and atomic excitations in the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard (JCH) model where the cavities are arranged in an Apollonian network (AN). The existence of a gapped field normal frequency spectrum along with strongly localized eigenstates on the AN highlights many of the features provided by the model. By numerically diagonalizing the JCH Hamiltonian in the single excitation subspace, we evaluate the time evolution of fully localized initial states, for many energy regimes. We provide a detailed description of the photonic quantum walk on the AN and also address …
We investigate the mean-field dynamics of a system of interacting photons in an array of coupled cavities in presence of dissipation and disorder. We follow the evolution of on an initially prepared Fock state, and show how the interplay between dissipation and disorder affects the coherence properties of the cavity emission and that these properties can be used as signatures of the many-body phase of the whole array.
We investigate the effect of disorder in the laser intensity on the dynamics of dark-state polaritons in an array of 20 cavities, each containing an ensemble of four-level atoms that is described by a Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We examine the evolution of the polariton number in the cavities starting from a state with either one or two polaritons in one of the cavities. For the case of a single polariton without disorder in the laser intensity, we calculate the wavefunction of the polariton and find that it disperses away from the initial cavity with time. The addition of disorder results in mi…
Bosons hopping across sites and interacting on-site are the essence of the Bose-Hubbard model (BHM). Inspired by the success of BHM simulators with atoms in optical lattices, proposals for implementing the BHM with photons in coupled nonlinear cavities have emerged. Two coupled semiconductor microcavities constitute a model system where the hopping, interaction, and decay of exciton polaritons --- mixed light-matter quasiparticles --- can be engineered in combination with site-selective coherent driving to implement the driven-dissipative two-site optical BHM. Here we explore the interplay of …
We study the statistics of the experimental eigenfunctions of chaotic and disordered microwave billiards in terms of the moments of their spatial distributions, such as the Inverse Participation Ratio (IPR) and density-density auto-correlation. A path from chaos to disorder is described in terms of increasing IPR. In the chaotic, ballistic limit, the data correspond well with universal results from random matrix theory. Deviations from universal distributions are observed due to disorder induced localization, and for the weakly disordered case the data are well-described by including finite co…
The calculation of the conductance of disordered rings requires a theory that goes beyond the Kubo-Drude formulation. Assuming "mesoscopic" circumstances the analysis of the electro-driven transitions show similarities with a percolation problem in energy space. We argue that the texture and the sparsity of the perturbation matrix dictate the value of the conductance, and study its dependence on the disorder strength, ranging from the ballistic to the Anderson localization regime. An improved sparse random matrix model is introduced to captures the essential ingredients of the problem, and lea…
We theoretically study how to control transport, bound states, and resonant states of a single photon in a one-dimensional coupled-cavity array. We find that the transport of a single photon in the cavity array can be controlled by tuning the frequency of either one or two cavities. If one of the cavities in the array has a tunable frequency, and its frequency is tuned to be larger (or smaller) than those of other cavities, then there is a photon bound state above (or below) the energy band of the coupled cavity array. However, if two cavities in the array have tunable frequencies, then there …
We introduce the first designs for high-Q photonic cavities in slab architectures in hyperuniform disordered solids displaying isotropic band gaps. Despite their disordered character, hyperuniform disordered structures have the ability to tightly confine the TE-polarised radiation in slab configurations that are readily fabricable. The architectures are based on carefully designed local modifications of otherwise unperturbed hyperuniform dielectric structures. We identify a wide range of confined cavity modes, which can be classified according to their approximate symmetry (monopole, dipole, q…
Non-universal correlations due to localization are observed in statistical properties of experimental eigenfunctions of quantum chaotic and disordered microwave cavities. Varying energy {E} and mean free path {l} enable us to experimentally tune from localized to delocalized states. Large level-to-level Inverse Participation Ratio (IPR I_{2}) fluctuations are observed for the disordered billiards, whose distribution is strongly asymmetric about <I_{2}>. The density auto-correlations of eigenfunctions are shown to decay exponentially and the decay lengths are experimentally determined. All the …
We investigate the emergence of long-range electron hopping mediated by cavity vacuum fields in disordered quantum Hall systems. We show that the counter-rotating (anti-resonant) light-matter interaction produces an effective hopping between disordered eigenstates within the last occupied Landau band. The process involves a number of intermediate states equal to the Landau degeneracy: each of these states consists of a virtual cavity photon and an electron excited in the next Landau band with the same spin. We study such a cavity-mediated hopping mechanism in the dual presence of a random diso…
Hyperuniform disordered photonic materials have recently been shown to display large, complete photonic band gaps and isotropic optical properties, and are emerging as strong candidates for a plethora of optoelectronic applications, making them competitive with many of their periodic and quasiperiodic counterparts. In this work, high quality factor optical cavities in hyperuniform disordered architectures are fabricated through semiconductor slabs and experimentally addressed by scanning near-field optical microscopy. The wide range of confined cavity modes that we detect arise from carefully …
We study a simple non-interacting nearest neighbor tight-binding model in one dimension with disorder, where the hopping terms are chosen randomly. This model exhibits a well-known singularity at the band center both in the density of states and localization length. If the probability distribution of the hopping terms is well-behaved, then the singularities exhibit universal behavior, the functional form of which was first discovered by Freeman Dyson in the context of a chain of classical harmonic oscillators. We show here that this universal form can be violated in a tunable manner if the hop…
We study the flow of the renormalized model parameters obtained from a sequence of simple transformations of the 1D Anderson model with long-range hierarchical hopping. Combining numerical results with a perturbative approach for the flow equations, we identify three qualitatively different regimes at weak disorder. For a sufficiently fast decay of the hopping energy, the Cauchy distribution is the only stable fixed-point of the flow equations, whereas for sufficiently slowly decaying hopping energy the renormalized parameters flow to a delta peak fixed-point distribution. In an intermediate r…
Quantum transport in disordered systems is studied using a polaron-based master equation. The polaron approach is capable of bridging the results from the coherent band-like transport regime governed by the Redfield equation to incoherent hopping transport in the classical regime. A non-monotonic dependence of the diffusion coefficient is observed both as a function of temperature and system-phonon coupling strength. In the band-like transport regime, the diffusion coefficient is shown to be linearly proportional to the system-phonon coupling strength, and vanishes at zero coupling due to Ande…
We analyze equilibrium properties of coupled-doped cavities described by the Jaynes-Cummings- Hubbard Hamiltonian. In particular, we characterize the entanglement of the system in relation to the insulating-superfluid phase transition. We point out the existence of a crossover inside the superfluid phase of the system when the excitations change from polaritonic to purely photonic. Using an ensemble statistical approach for small systems and stochastic-mean-field theory for large systems we analyze static disorder of the characteristic parameters of the system and explore the ground state indu…
We propose a scheme to realize the fractional quantum Hall system with atoms confined in a two-dimensional array of coupled cavities. Our scheme is based on simple optical manipulation of atomic internal states and inter-cavity hopping of virtually excited photons. It is shown that as well as the fractional quantum Hall system, any system of hard-core bosons on a lattice in the presence of an arbitrary Abelian vector potential can be simulated solely by controlling the phases of constantly applied lasers. The scheme, for the first time, exploits the core advantage of coupled cavity simulations…
We consider an array of coupled cavities with staggered inter-cavity couplings, where each cavity mode interacts with an atom. In contrast to large-size arrays with uniform-hopping rates where the atomic dynamics is known to be frozen in the strong-hopping regime, we show that resonant atom-field dynamics with significant energy exchange can occur in the case of staggered hopping rates even in the thermodynamic limit. This effect arises from the joint emergence of an energy gap in the free photonic dispersion relation and a discrete frequency at the gap's center. The latter corresponds to a bo…
We assess experimentally the suitability of coupled transmission line resonators for studies of quantum phase transitions of light. We have measured devices with low photon hopping rates t/2pi = 0.8MHz to quantify disorder in individual cavity frequencies. The observed disorder is consistent with small imperfections in fabrication. We studied the dependence of the disorder on transmission line geometry and used our results to fabricate devices with disorder less than two parts in 10^4. The normal mode spectrum of devices with a high photon hopping rate t/2pi = 31MHz shows little effect of diso…
Optical nanostructures have proven to be meritorious for tailoring the emission properties of quantum emitters. However, unavoidable fabrication imperfections may represent a nuisance. Quite remarkably, disorder offers new opportunities since light can be efficiently confined by random multiple scattering leading to Anderson localization. Here we investigate the effect of such disorder-induced cavities on the emission dynamics of single quantum dots embedded in disordered photonic-crystal waveguides. We present time-resolved measurements of both the total emission from Anderson-localized cavit…
We numerically investigate the link between the delocalization-localization transition and entanglement in a disordered long-range hopping model of spinless fermions by studying various static and dynamical quantities. This includes the inverse participation ratio, level-statistics, entanglement entropy and number fluctuations in the subsystem along with quench and wave-packet dynamics. Finite systems show delocalized, quasi-localized and localized phases. The delocalized phase shows strong area-law violation whereas the (quasi)localized phase adheres to (for large subsystems) the strict area …
Experimental realizations of disorder in optical lattices generate a distribution of the Bose-Hubbard (BH) parameters, like on-site potentials, hopping strengths, and interaction energies. We analyze this distribution for bosons in a bichromatic quasi-periodic potential by determining the generalized Wannier functions and calculating the corresponding BH parameters. Using a local mean-field cluster analysis, we study the effect of the corresponding disorder on the phase diagrams. We find a substantial amount of disorder in the hopping strengths, which produces strong deviations from the phase …
We demonstrate that, in a many-particle system, particles can be strongly confined to their sites. The localization is obtained by constructing a sequence of on-site energies that efficiently suppresses resonant hopping. The time during which a many-particle state remains strongly localized in an infinite chain can exceed the reciprocal hopping frequency by $\agt 10^6$ already for a narrow energy bandwidth. The results show viability of quantum computers with time-independent qubit coupling.
