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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Nonlinear laser cavities as nonclassical light sources

Teppo Häyrynen, Jani Oksanen, Jukka Tulkki

Published Dec 1, 2012• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

\n\nLight-emitting atoms or material in a cavity are well known to generate thermal or coherent fields depending on, e.g., the quality of the cavity and the strength of the excitation of the emitting material. We investigate the possibilities of generating antibunched photons and nonclassical light by adding nonlinear elements in the cavity and show that it is indeed feasible. In particular, we focus on cavities with emitters formed by macroscopic many-body systems like gas of excitons in semiconductor quantum wells where different nonlinearities in the emitters and absorbers will be shown to lead to bunched, Poissonian, and antibunched photon statistics. We show that, while the single two-state system with suitable coupling parameters can produce antibunched photons, macroscopic systems need an additional nonlinearity to generate antibunching phenomenon. Our results demonstrate that a nonclassical cavity field can be generated by a conventional laser when a suitable nonlinear absorbing element is added to the cavity structure. Thus, the proposed device configuration can be manufactured using standard optoelectronic materials and processing techniques.\n

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/100/54001

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\n\nLight-emitting atoms or material in a cavity are well known to generate thermal or coherent fields depending on, e.g., the quality of the cavity and the strength of the excitation of the emitting material. We investigate the possibilities of generating antibunched photons and nonclassical light by adding nonlinear elements in the cavity and show that it is indeed feasible. In particular, we focus on cavities with emitters formed by macroscopic many-body systems like gas of excitons in semiconductor quantum wells where different nonlinearities in the emitters and absorbers will be shown to lead to bunched, Poissonian, and antibunched photon statistics. We show that, while the single two-state system with suitable coupling parameters can produce antibunched photons, macroscopic systems need an additional nonlinearity to generate antibunching phenomenon. Our results demonstrate that a nonclassical cavity field can be generated by a conventional laser when a suitable nonlinear absorbing element is added to the cavity structure. Thus, the proposed device configuration can be manufactured using standard optoelectronic materials and processing techniques.\n
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Among the novel sources of nonclassical light that have recently been studied are a number of novel lasers. Conventional laser theory describes a classical stochastic field. I show that with a change in the standard operating conditions the conventional laser model produces nonclassical fields. Deviations from the classical description in standard laser theory are small by some inverse power of the threshold photon number. Operating conditions are designed to make stimulated emission dominant; thus laser cavities are good cavities that store photons and give a high threshold photon number. Low threshold photon numbers are achieved in bad cavities and most readily in a single-atom bad-cavity system. Such a system trades phase coherence for reduced intensity noise.
Nonclassical light fields can be generated from two coupled cavities that are interacted with a two-level system. This scheme is drawing extensive attention because the mode coupling can reduce the requirement of coupling constants between the light fields and the two-level system. However, the effect of phase differences between different coupling constants on photon antibunching is always neglected. Considering a two-level system interacting with two coupled cavities, we analyze the statistical properties of the cavity field and show that the photon antibunching can be affected by the phase differences of coupling constants between the two-level system and the cavity modes, or between the cavity modes and the driving fields, and thus we can engineer the phases to optimally modulate single-photon sources or nonclassical light fields.
We present a scheme for the realization of a stationary source of nonclassical light, which approximates very well a continuous single-photon source. It consists of a single four-level atom trapped inside a high-finesse optical cavity and Raman coupled to a cavity mode. A selectivity mechanism, based on a field-dependent Stark shift of electronic levels, prevents the occupation of two or more photon states of the quantized mode being excited. The output light of such a source exhibits sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics and antibunching behavior.