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Physical Review A

Zero eigenvalues of a photon blockade induced by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with a gain cavity

Y. H. Zhou, H. Z. Shen, X. Y. Zhang, X. X. Yi

Published Apr 10, 2018• 60 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Under the weak driving limitation, we find that the strong photon blockade can be triggered when all the eigenvalues of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian are equal to zero, so we name this the zero eigenvalues of a photon blockade induced by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. The possibility of realizing single- and two-photon blockades is investigated in the cavity QED system. A negative effective decay rate of the cavity is required, so the gain medium is needed to compensate the intrinsic loss rate of the cavity. The photon antibunching can be realized in both strong and weak nonlinear regimes, which is different from the conventional photon blockade and unconventional photon blockade. Our scheme has paved an avenue towards the study of photon blockades.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.97.043819

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Under the weak driving limitation, we find that the strong photon blockade can be triggered when all the eigenvalues of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian are equal to zero, so we name this the zero eigenvalues of a photon blockade induced by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. The possibility of realizing single- and two-photon blockades is investigated in the cavity QED system. A negative effective decay rate of the cavity is required, so the gain medium is needed to compensate the intrinsic loss rate of the cavity. The photon antibunching can be realized in both strong and weak nonlinear regimes, which is different from the conventional photon blockade and unconventional photon blockade. Our scheme has paved an avenue towards the study of photon blockades.
Abstract The unconventional photon blockade, which relies on the physical mechanism of quantum interference, is primarily investigated using a general master equation, where a weak nonlinearity must be presented in the system to achieve photon antibunching. In this study, we explore the unconventional photon blockade using an alternative master equation known as the two-photon absorption master equation, which is derived from the system and environment interaction via two-photon absorption. Specifically, we find that the unconventional photon blockade can be triggered in two-coupled cavities, where each cavity interacts with a two-photon absorption environment. Different from unconventional photon blockade via the general master equation, we show that the two-photon absorption acts as the weak nonlinearity, and this photon blockade corresponds to a large average photon number. To derive optimal conditions for achieving this blockade, we propose a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian method to describe the mode loss caused by the two-photon absorption. In addition, we highlight the distinctions between our proposal and other approaches for generating single-photon states based on two-photon absorption.
We theoretically investigate the quantum-interference-induced photon blockade effect in a single two-level atom-cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) system with degenerate parametric amplification. The analytical calculations reveal the optimal parametric gain and phase parameters for achieving optimum unconventional photon blockade conditions. Under the optimal parameter regime, the numerical results of the second-order correlation function demonstrate strong photon antibunching consistent with the analytical results. Furthermore, the numerical results corroborate that coherently driving the atom leads to a stronger photon blockade than a coherently driven cavity with the optimal parameters. We numerically demonstrate that the UPB effect is compromised by a non-zero cavity-atom coupling in the cavity-driven configuration. However, stronger photon antibunching can be attained with a non-zero cavity-atom coupling in the atom-driven configuration. This work may be suitable for experimentally realising a strongly antibunched single-photon source for applications in quantum technology.
Abstract We propose a scheme to implement photon blockade in a non-Hermitian circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit-QED) system where a single-mode cavity interacts with a two-level emitter through virtual photon excitation mediated by a coupler resonator. A damping compensation regime is introduced by the phase-lag arising from the medium mode, thereby the periodic exceptional points (EPs) are observed at which the system achieves gain-damping balance. This regime enables photon blockade to occur within the single-mode cavity with high-damping rate by controlling the gain circuit of the coupler, which breaks the limitation of a low-damping rate for photon blockade under weak drive and relaxes the stringent requirements on the quality factor of the cavity. The numerical simulations for the second-order correlation function, obtained using reported experimental parameters, exhibit excellent agreement with our analytical results. The findings of this study provide a circuit-QED solution for single-quantum devices based on the high-damping cavities, which is of great significance for integrated quantum computing networks.
Abstract In conventional photon blockade, the occupation of a cavity mode by more than one photon is suppressed via strong optical nonlinearity. An alternative, called unconventional photon blockade, can occur under weak nonlinearity by relying on quantum interference between fine-tuned cavities. A serious limitation to this approach is the very short antibunching time window, orders of magnitude less than the cavity lifetime. We present a scheme to achieve photon blockade over a large time window of several cavity lifetimes, even exceeding that of conventional photon blockade, while still requiring only weak nonlinearity. This “long-lived photon blockade” (LLPB) occurs when the single-particle Green’s function exhibits a zero at a large cavity loss rate, which is satisfied by an exemplary configuration of four coupled cavities under weak driving. Our analytical results agree well with wavefunction Monte Carlo simulations. The LLPB phenomenon may aid the development of single-photon sources utilizing materials with weak optical nonlinearities.
The photon blockade based on weak nonlinearities is called unconventional photon blockade. The studies of the unconventional photon blockade in recent decades are all limited to Markovian approximation. In this paper, we propose a scheme to achieve a strong photon antibunching in non-Markovian reservoir. An exact non-Markovian master equation for the optical cavity coupled with a degenerate optical parametric amplifier (DOPA) is derived. We show that this unconventional photon blockade originates from the destructive interference between two paths which are formed by the DOPA pump and a driving field. Unconventional single-photon blockades that exhibit a transition from the non-Markovian to Markovian regime by controlling environmental spectral width regardless of the weakness of DOPA gain and driving field are found. We analytically derive an optimal condition for strong antibunching, which is in good agreement with that obtained by the full numerical simulation. The presented results then are compared with that given by Markovian approximation in the weak-coupling limit. Our scheme might have paved an avenue towards the investigations of unconventional photon blockades in many other non-Markovian quantum systems in quantum optics.
Photon blockade (PB) is an important quantum phenomenon in cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). Here, we investigate the PB effect in the simplest cavity QED systems (one cavity containing first a single atom and then two atoms), where only the atoms are weakly driven. Via the analytical calculation and numerical simulation, we show that the strong PB can be generated even with the weak-coupling regime at the total resonance. This blockade is ascribed to the two-photon absorption, which is fundamentally different from the conventional and unconventional blockade mechanisms. Therefore, our study provides an alternative approach to produce the PB in the atom-driven cavity QED system.