Entanglement dynamics in dissipative photonic Mott insulators

We present a theoretical investigation of the entanglement dynamics in photonic Mott insulators in the presence of particle losses and dephasing [1], a class of quantum systems that has been recently demonstrated using superconducting quantum circuits [2]. We explore two configurations where entanglement is generated following the injection or extraction of a photon in the central site of a chain of microwave resonators. In spite of particle losses the quantum entanglement propagation exhibits a ballistic character with propagation speeds related to the different quasi-particles that are involved in the dynamics, namely photonic doublons and holons respectively. Our analysis reveals that photon dissipation has a strikingly asymmetric behavior in the two configurations with a much more dramatic role on the holon entanglement propagation than for doublons.

[1] K. Donatella, A. Biella, A. Le Boité, C. Ciuti, Entanglement dynamics in dissipative photonic Mott insulators, arXiv:2004.12883 [quant-ph], to be published in Physical Review Research.

[2] R. Ma, B. Saxberg, C. Owens, N. Leung, Y. Lu, J. Simon, and D. I. Schuster, A dissipatively stabilized Mott insulator of photons, Nature 566, 51 (2019).