Rydberg atoms have attracted extensive attentions in recent years due to exaggerated properties like long lifetimes and strong interactions. They are shown in theory and experiment to promise a versatile platform for quantum information processing and quantum many-body simulation. Here we briefly review a few important advances on nonequilibrium phase transitions due to collective quantum jumps, exotic interaction dynamics between single-photon pulses, and phase gate strategies based on single-photon storage using cold or thermal Rydberg atoms. We also introduce one of our recent works by presenting an efficient approach with a set of nonlocal potentials to simulate the propagation dynamics of interacting single-photon pulses in a Rydberg atomic ensemble. Our full dynamical calculations show some unexpected results lacked in previous works where more approximations are adopted to overcome the complexity in many-body systems.

吴金辉, 男, 1975年2月生, 黑龙江讷河人。教育部新世纪优秀人才和吉林省长白山学者特聘教授。2001年起在吉林大学任教, 2003年获理学博士学位, 2014年调至东北师范大学工作, 多次赴意大利比萨高师开展科研合作。主要从事量子光学领域的理论研究工作, 在Physical Review A等国内外学术期刊上发表SCI论文130余篇, 其中部分论文已被他人引用1200余次。科研工作曾获得饶毓泰基础光学奖优秀奖、吉林省青年科技奖和吉林省自然科学奖一等奖等多项奖励。