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Unconventional Photon Blockade in Quantum‐Well Microcavities with Squeezed Light

Houcem Jabri, Hichem Eleuch

Published May 13, 2021• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The single‐photon blockade effect arising in a cavity containing a quantum well and interacting with squeezed light, resulting from a down‐conversion process through a nonlinear medium, is investigated. Optical parametric oscillator (OPO) materials with positive and negative second‐order susceptibilities are considered. By solving the master equation analytically in the weak‐driving limit and calculating the second‐order equal‐time correlation function, it is found that strong photon antibunching can be achieved in this system with weak excitonic nonlinearity or squeezed light via a destructive quantum interference mechanism. The optimal conditions for the photon blockade are derived analytically and discussed in details. Unlike the excitonic nonlinearity, a strong photon blockade occurs with the squeezed light at total or quasitotal resonance, even in the weak coupling regime, using an OPO material with negative second‐order nonlinear susceptibility. By acting on the driving coherent pump frequency, the control of the cavity output is achieved and the scheme can serve as a tunable single‐photon emission source.

DOI
10.1002/pssb.202100094

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The single‐photon blockade effect arising in a cavity containing a quantum well and interacting with squeezed light, resulting from a down‐conversion process through a nonlinear medium, is investigated. Optical parametric oscillator (OPO) materials with positive and negative second‐order susceptibilities are considered. By solving the master equation analytically in the weak‐driving limit and calculating the second‐order equal‐time correlation function, it is found that strong photon antibunching can be achieved in this system with weak excitonic nonlinearity or squeezed light via a destructive quantum interference mechanism. The optimal conditions for the photon blockade are derived analytically and discussed in details. Unlike the excitonic nonlinearity, a strong photon blockade occurs with the squeezed light at total or quasitotal resonance, even in the weak coupling regime, using an OPO material with negative second‐order nonlinear susceptibility. By acting on the driving coherent pump frequency, the control of the cavity output is achieved and the scheme can serve as a tunable single‐photon emission source.
The antibunching effect generated in a cavity containing first a single two-level atomic system and then two identical atoms is explored for off-resonant interactions, in strong- and weak-coupling regimes. The cavity is driven by coherent and squeezed sources. Using the second-order correlation function analytically derived in the weak-excitation regime, we show that squeezed light achieves and improves strong antibunching, leading to a photon blockade. This enhancement is due to a destructive quantum interference mechanism induced by the nonclassical light, creating a supplementary transition pathway. The best effect is obtained for equal frequency detunings in the strong-coupling regime. More interestingly, our investigation reveals that the two-atom-cavity system can further improve the antibunching effect compared to the single-atom cavity. It turns out that the additional couplings appearing in the cavity due to the implementation of the two atoms, combined with the squeezed light, could substantially enhance the photon-blockade effect.
A significantly low value of the single-photon coupling constant is a major challenge in the creation of a single-photon source via photon blockade. Here, we propose a photon blockade scheme composed of a weakly second-order nonlinear medium with an optical parametric amplification in a low-frequency cavity. Unlike the traditional weakly coupled system, the effective coupling strength in the proposed scheme can be significantly higher than the decay rate of the cavity mode. This can be achieved by adjusting the squeezing parameter even if the original coupling strength is weak. The thermal noise of the squeezed cavity mode can be suppressed by a squeezed vacuum field. Using a probability amplitude method, we obtain the optimal condition of photon blockade in the steady-state. By solving the master equation numerically in the steady-state, a strong photon antibunching effect that is consistent with the optimal conditions can be obtained in the cavity with low frequency. Besides, the photon blockade phenomenon and cross-correlation of two cavities can be significantly enhanced under a specific squeezing parameter. Our results may be useful for future studies on the characteristics of photon statistics.
We propose a scheme to achieve a strong photon antibunching with a degenerate optical parametric amplifier coupled to a cavity via unconventional photon blockade. The photon blockade occurs as a result of the suppression of two-photon excitation due to a quantum interference effect between different transition paths. Via analytical calculations, we find out the conditions for optimized photon antibunching in terms of parametric gain and the parametric amplifier pump phase. Calculations of second-order correlation function demonstrate strong photon antibunching. The numerical results are compared with the analytical results and both are in complete agreement. Under the optimal parameters, the system can be used to generate sub-Poissonian light.
In the past few years, cavity optomechanical systems have received extensive attention and research and have achieved rapid development both theoretically and experimentally. The systems play an important role in many fields, such as quantum information processing, optomechanical storage, high-precision measurement, macroscopic entanglement, ultrasensitive sensors and so on. Photon manipulation has always been one of the key tasks in quantum information science and technology. Photon blockade is an important way to realize single photon sources and plays an important role in the field of quantum information. Due to the nonlinear coupling of the optical force system, the energy level is not harmonic, resulting in a photon blockade effect. In this paper, we study the phase-controlled tunable unconventional photon blockade in a single-atom-cavity system, and the second-order nonlinear crystals are attached to the cavity. The cavity interacts with squeezed light, which results in a nonlinear process. The system is driven by a complex pulsed laser, and the strength of the coherent driving contains the phase. We want to study the effect of squeezed light and phase. We use the second-order correlation function to numerically and theoretically analyze the photon blockade effect. We show that quantum interference of two-photon excitation between three different transition pathways can cause a photon blockade effect. When there is no squeezed light, the interference pathways becomes two, but there are still photon blockade effects. We explore the influence of the tunable phase and second-order nonlinear strength on the photon blockade effect. We calculate the correlation function and compare the numerical results with the analytical results under certain parameters and find that the agreement is better.
Abstract We propose an unconventional photon blockade scheme in coupled semiconductor microcavities embedded in a nonlinear Kerr medium in the presence of photon leakage and bimodal driving on two cavity modes, which consists of two spatially overlapping single-mode semiconductor cavities with cross-Kerr nonlinearity and two-photon tunneling. A detailed analysis is derived for the exact optimal conditions for strong photon antibunching with weak Kerr nonlinearities. It is very important to find the transition of the structures of the solution for the optimal detuning from the quartic equation to the cubic equation when changing the two complex driving fields appropriately. The transition originates from the second driving field that compensates the numbers of interference paths reaching a two-photon state. This unconventional photon blockade can be realized by coupled photonic crystal cavities filled with a nonlinear Kerr medium. This implies that nonlinear Kerr medium systems can be used to generate tunable single-photon sources by tuning the strength and relative phase of two complex driving fields under weak Kerr nonlinearity.
This study systematically investigates unconventional photon blockade in two coupled Kerr nonlinear cavities at resonance. By solving the master equation in the steady-state limit and calculating the equal-time second-order correlation function, the photon antibunching effect within the nonlinear regime is revealed. Through analytical derivations, four sets of optimal antibunching conditions are obtained and validated through numerical simulations, unveiling new characteristics of photon blockade. Furthermore, the influence of system parameters on photon blockade is discussed, providing valuable theoretical support for optimizing the design and implementation of single-photon sources.