Waveguide-QED platform for synthetic quantum matter

An exciting frontier in quantum information science is the realization and control of complex quantum many-body systems. The hybrid nanophotonic system with cold atoms has emerged as a paradigmatic platform for realizing long-range spin models from the bottom up, exploiting their modal geometry and group dispersion for tailored interactions. An important challenge is the physical limitation imposed by the photonic bath, constraining the types of local Hamiltonians that decompose the available physical models and restricting the spatial dimensions to that of the dielectric media. However, at the nanoscopic scale, atom-field interaction inherently accompanies significant driven-dissipative quantum forces that may be tamed as a new form of a mediator for controlling the atomic internal states. Here we formulate a quantum optics toolbox for constructing universal quantum matter with individual atoms in the vicinity of one-dimensional photonic crystal waveguides. The enabling platform synthesizes analog quantum materials of universal 2-local Hamiltonian graphs mediated by phononic superfluids of the trapped atoms. We generalize our microscopic theory of an analog universal quantum simulator to the development of dynamical gauge fields. In the spirit of gauge theories, we investigate emergent lattice models of arbitrary graphs, for which strongly coupled SU(n) excitations are driven by an underlying multibody interaction. As a minimal model in the infrared, we explore the realization of an archetypical strong-coupling quantum field theory, the SU(n) Wess-Zumino-Witten model, and discuss a diagnostic tool to map the conformal data of the field theory to the static and dynamical correlators of the fluctuating photons in the guided mode.