Title: Quantum Optics with Floquet and Cavity Quantum Materials
Abstract: The coherent manipulation of macroscopic quantum systems with light is a frontier for controlling materials properties. Ultrafast pump-probe experiments have enabled the selective manipulation of quantum states in materials, while advances in coupling quantum materials to photons in a resonant cavity promise to extend quantum-optical techniques and cavity quantum electrodynamics to correlated electron systems. In this talk, I will discuss how quantum-optical control and measurement techniques can provide a useful window into the nature of many-body states in quantum materials which are strongly coupled to photons or far from thermal equilibrium. I will first describe how recent Floquet pump-probe experiments on a one-dimensional Mott insulator can be viewed through the lens of standard single-emitter control protocols. I will argue that leveraging the quantum-geometric structure of electronic wavefunctions can provide a bottom-up design principle for achieving strong coupling of photons and matter. I will then discuss how placing correlated materials inside optical cavities can lead to pronounced antibunching of photons transmitted through the cavity, observable via the second-order photon coherence g⁽²⁾(t) that measures the statistical correlation of photon pairs. Near a quantum critical point, such systems can realize a many-body photon blockade regime, enabling the generation of single photons or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs via leveraging strong matter fluctuations.