Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kuzmin, R.
• Grabon, N.
• Mehta, N.
• Burshtein, A.
• Goldstein, M.
• Houzet, M.
• Glazman, L. I.
• Manucharyan, V. E.

Titel

Inelastic Scattering of a Photon by a Quantum Phase Slip

Ist Teil von

• Physical review letters, 2021-05, Vol.126 (19), p.1-197701, Article 197701

Ort / Verlag

College Park: American Physical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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 nonlinear 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 represent a rare example of verified and useful quantum many-body simulation.