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Scientific Reports

All-optical control of three-photon spectra and time asymmetry in a strongly coupled cavity polariton system

Xinran Zhang, Ruinian Li, Haibin Wu

Published Mar 3, 2016• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Manipulating the nature of photons emission is one of the basic tasks in quantum optics and photonics. The ever growing list of quantum applications requires a robust means of controlling the strongly coupled coherent interaction of photons and matter. Here, we investigate three-photon transmission spectra in a strongly coupled cavity polariton system and show that the correlation functions and transmitted photon stream can be optically manipulated. The dynamics of single photons and photon pairs at the polariton resonances can be changed by light from a single external coupling laser. At the "dark-state polariton," three-photon transmission is a perfectly coherent field in contrast to the strong photon-bunching behavior of a typical cavity quantum electrodynamics system. When the detuned probe light is tuned to the "bright polariton," the light exhibits a dramatic photon antibunching effect. Remarkably, the Fano-resonant asymmetric three-photon transmission caused by the interference between the dressed states leads to a new quantum feature that is strongly nonclassical (the third-order correlation function g((3))(0, 0) ≪ 1) and has a wide and tunable bandwidth. The dependence of the intrinsic third-order correlation and time symmetry of the photon stream on the controlled parameters is also examined. Strongly nonclassical, all-optically controllable multi-photon dynamics are very important for future quantum devices and metrology.

DOI
10.1038/srep22560

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Manipulating the nature of photons emission is one of the basic tasks in quantum optics and photonics. The ever growing list of quantum applications requires a robust means of controlling the strongly coupled coherent interaction of photons and matter. Here, we investigate three-photon transmission spectra in a strongly coupled cavity polariton system and show that the correlation functions and transmitted photon stream can be optically manipulated. The dynamics of single photons and photon pairs at the polariton resonances can be changed by light from a single external coupling laser. At the "dark-state polariton," three-photon transmission is a perfectly coherent field in contrast to the strong photon-bunching behavior of a typical cavity quantum electrodynamics system. When the detuned probe light is tuned to the "bright polariton," the light exhibits a dramatic photon antibunching effect. Remarkably, the Fano-resonant asymmetric three-photon transmission caused by the interference between the dressed states leads to a new quantum feature that is strongly nonclassical (the third-order correlation function g((3))(0, 0) ≪ 1) and has a wide and tunable bandwidth. The dependence of the intrinsic third-order correlation and time symmetry of the photon stream on the controlled parameters is also examined. Strongly nonclassical, all-optically controllable multi-photon dynamics are very important for future quantum devices and metrology.
We propose and analyze a scheme for controlling coherent photon transmission and reflection in a cavity-quantum-electrodynamics (CQED) system consisting of an optical resonator coupled with three-level atoms coherently prepared by a control laser from free space. When the control laser is off and the cavity is excited by two identical light fields from two ends of the cavity, the two input light fields can be completely absorbed by the CQED system and the light energy is converted into the excitation of the polariton states, but no light can escape from the cavity. Two distinct cases of controlling the perfect photon absorption are analyzed: (a) when the control laser is tuned to the atomic resonance and creates electromagnetically induced transparency, the perfect photon absorption is suppressed and the input light fields are nearly completely transmitted through the cavity; (b) when the control laser is tuned to the polariton state resonance and inhibits the polariton state excitation, the perfect photon absorption is again suppressed and the input light fields are nearly completely reflected from the cavity. Thus, the CQED system can act as a perfect absorber or near-perfect transmitter and/or reflector by simply turning the control laser off or on. Such interference control of the coherent photon-atom interaction in the CQED system should be useful for a variety of applications in optical logical devices.
The coherent light-matter interaction at the single-photon and electronic qubit level promises to be a remarkable potential for nonclassical information processing. Besides the efforts of improving the figure of merit of the cavities, here we demonstrate strong anharmonicity in the polariton dressed states via dark state resonances in a highly dissipative cavity. It is shown that the vacuum Rabi oscillation occurs for a single quantum emitter inside a cavity even with the bosonic decay-to-interaction rate ratio exceeding 102{10}^{2}102, when the photon field is coupled to an auxiliary high-QQQ cavity. Moreover, photon blockade is observable in such a highly dissipative cavity quantum electrodynamics system. This study provides a promising platform for overcoming decoherence and advancing the coherent manipulation of polariton qubits.
Starting from the semiclassical theory of light–matter interaction, we have theoretically investigated the substantial influences of two coherent driving fields on manipulating the single-photon transmission probability in the extensively studied atom-cavity-waveguide coupled system. The results strictly demonstrate that under the relatively large photon-cavity detuning and moderately strong driving fields, the single-photon transmission probability increases remarkably from the original 0 to 1 by controlling the coherent fields in the nondissipative environment, which manifests the manipulation of the coherent fields as a sort of highly controllable external tool to efficiently act as an experimentally available all-optical quantum switching. In contrast, the behavior independent from variation of coherent fields and characterized by the stationary transmission spectrum appears under the photon-atom on-resonance condition. Similar properties can also be observed in the dissipative environment. These distinct characteristics essentially reveal some significant functionalities of coherent field control in influencing the single-photon transmission spectrum, which may have potential applications in designing efficient photonic devices.
We present a theoretical scheme to study optical cavity quantum electrodynamics using dark-state polaritons. Exploiting the highly tunable lifetimes of the photons in the form of cavity dark-state polaritons, we push the strong coupling of single optical photons to an effective two-level emitter in a Rydberg-blockade atomic ensemble to an unprecedented regime. The resulting Jaynes--Cummings model with extremely strong coupling is of fundamental interest. We discuss applications in controlled quantum Rabi oscillation, nonlinear spectroscopy of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder, as well as the generation of nonclassical states, all based on light-matter interactions in the optical domain.
Deterministic generation and manipulation of nonclassical light are the central goals of quantum photonics. Waveguide quantum electrodynamics with atomic arrays enable strong photon–photon interactions via collective effects. Recently, giant atoms with multiple coupling points have opened new avenues for engineering photon correlations. In particular, the braided configuration offers unique features; however, most studies on quantum nonlinearity are limited to two atoms. Here, we extend the investigation to arrays of more braided giant atoms and uncover two distinct regimes controlled by phase parameters. One regime corresponds to Lorentzian resonances in the single-excitation subspace, where the system behaves as an effective two-level model at resonance, producing bunched transmitted light and antibunched reflected light. The two-excitation nonlinearity is weaker and tends to bunch photons, and at triple resonance the system loses tunability. The second regime corresponds to the Fano resonance arising from the spectral coalescence of the collective modes. In this regime, we achieve near-unity transmission with strong photon antibunching in transmission, and significant photon bunching in reflection. Our results establish braided giant-atom arrays as a scalable, cavity-free platform for engineering nonclassical photon correlations.
We present a study of collective multiphoton blockade in coherently driven atoms in a single-mode cavity. Considering two atoms strongly coupled to an optical cavity, we show that the two-photon blockade with two-photon antibunching, and the three-photon blockade with three-photon antibunching can be observed simultaneously. The three-photon blockade probes both dressed states in the two-photon and three-photon spaces. The two-photon and three-photon blockades strongly depend on the location of the two atoms in the strong-coupling regime. The asymmetry in the atom-cavity coupling constants opens pathways for multiphoton blockade which is also shown to be sensitive to the atomic decay and pumping strengths. The work presented here predicts many quantum statistical features due to the collective behavior of atoms and can be useful to generate nonclassical photon pairs.