Strongly interacting photons

Vladan Vuletić, Thibault Peyronel, Ofer Firstenberg +4 more

Standard nonlinear optical materials exhibit negligible nonlinearity at the level of individual photons. We discuss two methods to generate strong photon-photon interactions using either atom-cavity coupling, or strong interactions between atoms in Rydberg states. In particular, we have demonstrated an all-optical transistor gated by one stored photon, and a bound state of two photons.

Mohammad F. Maghrebi, Ofer Firstenberg, Alexey Vyacheslavovich Gorshkov

Shuo Sun, Glenn S. Solomon, Edo Waks A

We show that the presence of a single photon deterministically controls the transmission of another photon. Their strong interactions are mediated by a single quantum dot spin that is strongly coupled to a nanophotonic cavity.

Elnaz Darsheshdar, Mathilde Hugbart, Romain Bachelard +1 more

We investigate two-color photon correlations in the light emitted by two strongly driven, strongly interacting two-level emitters. The correlations are interpreted introducing the collective dressed states picture, which allows us to describe both bunching and antibunching based on the allowed and prohibited transitions. At odds from weakly interacting emitters, the strong interaction lifts the degeneracy of the energy differences between the different states, leading to a temporal breaking of symmetry for the correlations: photons of different frequencies may not be emitted in any order. Finally, we show that most of the virtual processes, which involve pairs of photons, yield nonclassical correlations when the sum of their energies fits any of the interaction-induced sidebands in the emitted spectrum. In particular, depending on the frequency of the emitted photons, correlations strong enough to violate Bell inequalities can appear.

Mohammad Hafezi