Single photon pulse induced transient entanglement force

We show that a single photon pulse (SPP) incident on two interacting two-level atoms induces a transient entanglement force between them. After absorption of a multi-mode Fock state pulse, the time-dependent atomic interaction mediated by the vacuum fluctuations changes from the van der Waals interaction to the resonant dipole-dipole interaction (RDDI). We explicitly show that the RDDI force induced by the SPP fundamentally arises from the...