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Inelastic Scattering of a Photon by a Quantum Phase Slip
R Kuzmin1, N Grabon1, N Mehta1
1Department of Physics, Joint Quantum Institute, and Quantum Materials Center, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Abstract:
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.
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