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Physical Review A

Enhanced unconventional photon-blockade effect in one- and two-qubit cavities interacting with nonclassical light

Houcem Jabri, Hichem Eleuch

Published Aug 3, 2022• 28 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.106.023704

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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.
We theoretically study the quantum-interference-induced photon blockade and antiblockade phenomenon in an atom-cavity QED system, where the destructive [constructive] interference between two different transition pathways prohibits [enhances] two-photon excitation. To begin with, we study a single-atom--cavity QED system where the atom or cavity is driven by a coherent pump field. We show that the cavity-driven case will lead to the quantum-interference-induced photon blockade under a specific condition, but such an interference-induced photon blockade cannot be realized in the atom-driven case. This is an important consequence of the pathways possible for the two types of drives. Then, we investigate the two-atom case, and find that an additional transition pathway appears in the atom-driven case. We show that this additional transition pathway results in the quantum-interference-induced photon blockade only when the atomic resonant frequency is different from the cavity mode frequency otherwise antiblockade occurs. Moreover, in this case, the condition for realizing the interference-induced photon blockade is independent of the system's intrinsic parameters, which can be used to generate antibunched photons in both weak and strong coupling regimes.
A two-level system interacting with a cavity field is an important model for investigating the photon blockade (PB) effect. Most work on this topic has been based on the assumption that the atomic transition frequency is resonant with the fundamental mode frequency of the cavity. We relax this constraint and reexamine PB in a more general atom--cavity system with arbitrary atomic and cavity detunings from a driving field. The results show that when the signs of the atomic and cavity detunings are the same, PB occurs only in the strong-coupling regime, but for opposite signs of the atomic and cavity detunings, strong photon antibunching is observed in both the weak- and strong-coupling regimes and a better PB effect is achieved compared with the case when the signs are the same. More interestingly, we find that this PB arises from quantum interference for both weak and strong nonlinearities. These results deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanism of PB and may be help in the construction of single-photon sources with higher purity and better flexibility using atom--cavity systems.
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.
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.
We study the photon blockade effect in a coupled cavity system, which is formed by a linear cavity coupled to a Kerr-type nonlinear cavity via a photon-hopping interaction. We explain the physical phenomenon from the viewpoint of the conventional and unconventional photon blockade effects. The corresponding physical mechanisms of the two kinds of photon blockade effects are based on the anharmonicity in the eigenenergy spectrum and the destructive quantum interference between two different transition paths, respectively. In particular, we find that the photon blockade via destructive quantum interference also exists in the conventional photon blockade regime and that the unconventional photon blockade occurs in both the weak- and strong-Kerr nonlinearity cases. The photon blockade effect can be observed by calculating the second-order correlation function of the cavity field. This model is general and hence it can be implemented in various experimental setups such as coupled optical-cavity systems, coupled photon-magnon systems, and coupled superconducting-resonator systems. We present some discussions on the experimental feasibility.
Photon antibunching based on a single two-level atom strongly coupled to a single-mode optical cavity has been demonstrated in experiments. Here, we put forward an improved version of such an antibunching by introducing a pump field and a microwave field in the coupled atom-cavity system to form both a three-level $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$-type transition and closed-loop coupling. Via calculating the zero-time-delay second-order correlation function g(2)(0){g}^{(2)}(0)g(2)(0) of the single-mode cavity field, we find that a complete photon blockade, namely, g(2)(0)=0{g}^{(2)}(0)=0g(2)(0)=0, can be well achieved without detuning the driving and cavity resonance. In addition, it is clearly shown that this strong photon antibunching effect appears in the weak-coupling regime of light-atom interactions. The enhanced photon antibunching is ascribed to quantum interference between the two transition paths from the three-level $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ atom weakly coupled to the three involved fields (cavity, pump, and microwave). Our proposal is useful for the single-photon generation by photon blockade, which has applications in quantum information processing.