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arXiv:quant-ph/9902005 · Physical Review A

Photon-photon interactions in cavity electromagnetically induced transparency

M. J. Werner, Ataç İmamoğlu

Published Dec 8, 1999• 162 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Dissipation-free photon-photon interaction at the single-photon level is studied in the context of cavity electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). For a single multilevel atom exhibiting EIT in the strong cavity-coupling regime, the anharmonicity of the atom-cavity system has an upper bound determined by single atom-photon coupling strength. A photon blockade effect is inferred to occur for both single- and multiatom cases from the behavior of transition rates between dressed states of the system. Numerical calculations of the second-order coherence function indicate that photon antibunching in both single- and two-atom cases are strong and comparable.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.61.011801

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Dissipation-free photon-photon interaction at the single-photon level is studied in the context of cavity electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). For a single multilevel atom exhibiting EIT in the strong cavity-coupling regime, the anharmonicity of the atom-cavity system has an upper bound determined by single atom-photon coupling strength. A photon blockade effect is inferred to occur for both single- and multiatom cases from the behavior of transition rates between dressed states of the system. Numerical calculations of the second-order coherence function indicate that photon antibunching in both single- and two-atom cases are strong and comparable.
Quantum limit of dissipation-free photon-photon interactions at the few photon level is studied in the context of giant Kerr nonlinearities in cavity electromagneti cally induced transparency (EIT). It is shown that photon-photon interaction is largest when the cavity contains a sing le atom. In contrast to conventional nonlinearities, increasing the number of atoms cannot in crease the interaction strength but will in general degrade the performance by enhancing di spersion. In the non-perturbative regime, the single-atom photon-photon interaction can be limited by lossy states excited from long-lived EIT states. Asymptotically, in the strong coupling limit, photon-photon interaction is determined by the single photon-atom coupling strength. Photon blockade occurs for single atoms but only partial blockade can occur for low dispersion and not at all in the high-dispersion limit of the multi-atom case.
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.
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We explore the photon statistics of light emitted from a system comprising a single four-level atom strongly coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity mode that is driven by a coherent laser field. In the weak driving regime this system is found to exhibit a photon blockade effect. For intermediate driving strengths we find a sudden change in the photon statistics of the light emitted from the cavity. Photon antibunching switches to photon bunching over a very narrow range of intracavity photon number. It is proven that this sudden change in photon statistics occurs due to the existence of robust quantum interference of transitions between the dressed states of the atom-cavity system. Furthermore, it is shown that the strong photon bunching is a nonclassical effect for certain values of driving field strength, violating classical inequalities for field correlations.
Interference-induced photon antibunching is investigated for a three-level system coupled to a cavity mode, in which the level scheme is of a lambda type. One of the transitions is weakly coupled to the cavity mode while the other is driven by a control field. Without the control field, i.e. , in the conventional cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) scheme in the weak coupling regime, photon antibunching can be achieved by carefully choosing the coupling strength and the detuning. This condition can be alleviated by tuning the strength and the frequency of the control field. The condition for the optimal control field that yields photon blockade is derived, and the effects of changing various parameters are investigated. For a given a set of dissipation rates, the atom-cavity coupling strength g needs to be higher than a certain threshold value, although the whole system still remains in the weak coupling regime. A numerical method for finding the optimal parameter regime is proposed.
We explore the photon statistics of light emitted from a system comprising a single four--level atom strongly coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity mode which is driven by a coherent laser field. In the weak driving regime this system is found to exhibit a photon blockade effect. For intermediate driving strengths we find a sudden change in the photon statistics of the light emitted from the cavity. Photon antibunching switches to photon bunching over a very narrow range of intracavity photon number. It is proven that this sudden change in photon statistics occurs due to the existence of robust quantum interference of transitions between the dressed states of the atom-cavity system. Furthermore, it is shown that the strong photon bunching is a nonclassical effect for certain values of driving field strength, violating classical inequalities for field correlations.