Photonic quantum simulators: Mimicking condensed matter physics using photons

The author starts by describing the basic motivation for using strongly interacting systems of photons to simulate condensed matter phenomena. A brief review of the results on the simulations of Mott to superfluid phase transitions in coupled cavities doped with two level systems from the previous work by Angelakis et. al (2007) were presented. The main ideas behind the photonic simulation of quantum spin models, the fractional Hall effect, and many-body entanglement in dissipative cavity arrays were also referenced. The main part of the paper is devoted in analyzing recent results in the simulation of quantum Luttinger liquids and spin-charge separation using photons in a hollow fiber filled with atoms. The work towards the realization of the sine-Gordon model and the “pinning transition” in the same system in the work of Angelakis et. al (2011) was also presented .