Emergence of solitons from many-body photon bound states in quantum nonlinear media

Abstract: Solitons are known to occur in the context of atom-light interaction via the well-known semi-classical phenomenon of self-induced transparency (SIT). Separately, in the regime where both light and atoms are fully treated quantum mechanically, quantum few-photon bound states are known to be a ubiquitous phenomenon that arises in different systems such as atoms coupled to chiral or bidirectional waveguides, and in Rydberg atomic media. In the specific case of two-level atoms coupled to a chiral waveguide, a recent analysis based on Bethe ansatz has established that SIT emerges from the quantum realm as a superposition of quantum many-photon bound states. Beyond this case, however, the nature of any connection between the full quantum many-body regime and semi-classical behavior has not been established. Here, we employ a general spin-model formulation of quantum atom-light interfaces to numerically investigate this problem, taking advantage of the fact that this approach readily allows for powerful many-body simulations based on matrix product states (MPS). We first analytically derive the two-photon bound state dispersion relation for a variety of atom-light interfaces, and then proceed to numerically investigate the multi-excitation bound states dynamics. Interestingly, for all the specific systems studied, we find that the large-photon number limit always coincides with the soliton phenomenon of self-induced transparency or immediate generalizations thereof.