2023 Departmental Poster Competition

Light-matter coupling underlies many fundamental quantum mechanical process, as well as being foundational to quantum informational platforms. While the study of coupling to two-state systems is extensive, work on many-body systems coupled to light is select. In this work we study radiation from a finite-sized one-dimensional electron system coupled to light. We consider how an exited state of the system relaxes via the emission of photons. We find that despite the seemingly trivial florescence, the electronic states exhibit entanglement and superradiance, analogous to the Dicke model. In general, we find that the decay processes involve a ‘competition’ between superradiance and Pauli blocking.  This work made extensive use of the bosonization and representation theory. Future work involves studying a number of quantum critical systems making use of conformal field theory (CFT) such as Majorana chains, spin chains and certain fractional quantum Hall edge states.