The dynamical behavior of a coupled cavity array is investigated when each cavity contains a three-level atom. For the uniform and staggered intercavity hopping, the whole system Hamiltonian can be analytically diagonalized in the subspace of single-atom excitation. The quantum state transfer along the cavities is analyzed in detail for distinct regimes of parameters, and some interesting phenomena including binary transmission, selective localization of the excitation population are revealed. We demonstrate that the uniform coupling is more suitable for the quantum state transfer. It is shown that the initial state of polariton located in the first cavity is crucial to the transmission fidelity, and the local entanglement depresses the state transfer probability. Exploiting the metastable state, the distance of the quantum state transfer can be much longer than that of Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model. A higher transmission probability and longer distance can be achieved by employing a class of initial encodings and final decodings.
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