Resonant Strong Field Nonlinear Optical Interactions

Valerii S. Butylkin, Yury G. Khronopulo, A. E. Kaplan +1 more

Sven Ramelow, Alessandro Farsi, Z. Vernon +6 more

We demonstrate that nondegenerate four-wave mixing in a Si_{3}N_{4} microring resonator can result in a nonlinear coupling rate between two optical fields exceeding their energy dissipation rate in the resonator, corresponding to strong nonlinear coupling. We demonstrate that this leads to a Rabi-like splitting, for which we provide a theoretical description in agreement with our experimental results. This yields new insight into the dynamics of nonlinear optical interactions in microresonators and access to novel phenomena.

Thomas Elsaesser, Klaus Reimann, Michael Woerner

Abhinav Kala, David Sharp, Minho Choi +7 more

Nonlinear interactions between photons are fundamentally weak as the photons do not interact directly with each other, and any interaction is mediated by matter. This has motivated researchers over many decades to search for strongly nonlinear materials (by controlling electronic properties) and optical resonators with strong spatial and temporal confinement of light. An extreme form of nonlinear optics is quantum nonlinear optics, where we can realize nonlinear interaction between single photons. Such quantum nonlinear optics is at the heart of any photonic quantum information system including analog quantum simulation and fault-tolerant quantum computing. While engineering light-matter interactions can effectively create photon-photon interactions, the required photon number to observe any nonlinearity are normally very high, where any quantum-mechanical signature disappears. However, with emerging low-dimensional materials and engineered photonic resonators, the photon number can be reduced to reach the quantum nonlinear optical regime. In this review paper, we discuss different mechanisms exploited in solid-state platforms to attain quantum nonlinear optics. We review emerging materials and optical resonator architectures with different dimensionalities. We also present future research directions and open problems in this field.

O. Blum, P. J. Harshman, T. Kenneth Gustafson +1 more

The Liouville equation for the density matrix can be recast so that the external-field terms which couple density-matrix elements are second order in the field. This approach is shown to have a profound effect on the steady-state analysis of strong-field resonant nonlinear optical problems. First, in the case where parity or appropriate field restrictions apply, there is a reduction of the number of coupled equations which must be solved by at least a factor of 2. Second, this reformulation naturally leads to radiative-renormalization terms which are directly related to saturation, Stark shifts, and Rabi splittings. We can use this simple formalism to obtain solutions to a number of resonant nonlinear problems including cases where there are two or more strong fields. The renormalization described here is equivalent to a Dyson-equation analysis.

С. В. Гапоненко