Quantum fluctuations in optical bistability with nonclassical pump

Jean-Michel Courty, Philippe Grangier, Laurent Hilico +1 more

Luigi A. Lugiato, G. Strini

Ullrich Martini, Christian Ginzel, Axel Schenzle

Michael J. DelleDonne, Péter Richter, John Ross

Kai Guo, Lin Yang, Xiaodong Shi +7 more

This study presents $e\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}x\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}p\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}e\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}r\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}m\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}e\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}n\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}t\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}a\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}l$ evidence of nonclassical optical bistability, in the context of photon-pair generation via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a silicon microring resonator. The hysteresis results greatly benefit on-chip quantum optics, to build a bridge between classical and potential nonclassical applications of optical bistability in microcavities. This work also improves traditional resonance-locked strategies by balancing power-induced heating and active cooling; since no precise pump tuning is required, the proposed resonance-locked regime can be more widely applied in fixed-wavelength optical communication systems.

Jing Tang, Yuangang Deng

Abstract We study the nonequilibrium dynamic behaviors in a driven-dissipative single-atom cavity electromagnetically induced transparency. The optical bistability and multistability beyond a Kerr nonlinearity are observed utilizing the optical Stark shift induced strong nonlinearity. We show that the nonequilibrium dynamical phase transition between bistability and multistability is highly tunable by the system parameters in a large parameter region. The first-order dissipative optical bistability (multistability) always corresponds to the photon-bunching quantum statistics, which indicates that the quantum fluctuations and correlations play important roles in nonequilibrium dynamics. Interestingly, bistability and multistability with photon-bunching quantum statistics occurring at extremely low steady-state cavity photon number are observed, even under a very strong cavity driven field. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the unique cavity steady-state solution of the full quantum calculation is excellently consistent with the lowest solution based on the semiclassical mean-field approach in bistability and multistability regimes when the cavity photon number is much less than unity, albeit these nonclassical quantum states should possess strong quantum fluctuations in this parameter regime. Our results pave the way to exploring nonclassical correlated optical multistability in quantum regime, which may bring exciting opportunities for potential applications from quantum information processing to quantum metrology.