QUANTUM DEVICES MADE OF ATOMS

Abstract

In this thesis, we investigate theoretically the interaction between light and matter in the context of waveguide QED. This recent platform allows to reach strong interaction between atoms and a continuum of bosonic modes propagating in a one-dimensional waveguide, with various experimental implementations to date based on caesium atoms as well as artificial atoms. Our main contributions reported here are a novel method for solving the scattering of N photons on a single atom without computation (arXiv:1603.02804), the finding that a cavity formed of atomic mirrors is able to reproduce cavity quantum electrodynamics, and in particular vacuum Rabi oscillations, when operated in the non-Markovian regime (arXiv:1505.07908), and the quantum study of a diode made of a pair of non-identical atoms which had been previously proposed based on a semi-classical description (arXiv:1510.04494).