No Arabic abstract
We theoretically study the quantum interference induced photon blockade phenomenon in atom cavity QED system, where the destructive interference between two different transition pathways prohibits the two-photon excitation. Here, we first explore the single atom cavity QED system via an atom or cavity drive. We show that the cavity-driven case will lead to the quantum interference induced photon blockade under a specific condition, but the atom driven case cant result in such interference induced photon blockade. Then, we investigate the two atoms 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 if the atomic resonant frequency is different from the cavity mode frequency. Moreover, in this case, the condition for realizing the interference induced photon blockade is independent of the systems intrinsic parameters, which can be used to generate antibunched photon source both in weak and strong coupling regimes.
Coherent control of interfering one- and two-photon processes has for decades been the subject of research to achieve the redirection of photocurrent. The present study develops two-pathway coherent control of ground state helium atom above-threshold photoionization for energies up to the $N=2$ threshold, based on a multichannel quantum defect and R-matrix calculation. Three parameters are controlled in our treatment: the optical interference phase $DeltaPhi$, the reduced electric field strength $chi=mathcal{E}_{omega}^2/{mathcal{E}_{2omega}}$, and the final state energy $epsilon$. A small energy change near a resonance is shown to flip the emission direction of photoelectrons with high efficiency, through an example where $90%$ of photoelectrons whose energy is near the $2p^2 ^1S^e$ resonance flip their emission direction. However, the large fraction of photoelectrons ionized at the intermediate state energy, which are not influenced by the optical control, make this control scheme challenging to realize experimentally.
We use the scattering matrix formalism to analyze photon blockade in coherently-driven CQED systems with a weak drive. By approximating the weak coherent drive by an input single- and two-photon Fock state, we reduce the computational complexity of the transmission and the two-photon correlation function from exponential to polynomial in the number of emitters. This enables us to easily analyze cavity-based systems containing $sim$50 quantum emitters with modest computational resources. Using this approach we study the coherence statistics of polaritonic photon blockade while increasing the number of emitters for resonant and detuned multi-emitter CQED systems --- we find that increasing the number of emitters worsens photon blockade in resonant systems, and improves it in detuned systems. We also analyze the impact of inhomogeneous broadening in the emitter frequencies on both polaritonic and subradiant photon blockade through this system.
We observe the unconventional photon blockade effect in quantum dot cavity QED, which, in contrast to conventional photon blockade, operates in the weak coupling regime. A single quantum dot transition is simultaneously coupled to two orthogonally polarized optical cavity modes, and by careful tuning of the input and output state of polarization, the unconventional photon blockade effect is observed. We find a minimum second-order correlation $g^{(2)}(0)approx0.37$ which corresponds to $g^{(2)}(0)approx0.005$ when corrected for detector jitter, and observe the expected polarization dependency and photon bunching and anti-bunching very close-by in parameter space, which indicates the abrupt change from phase to amplitude squeezing.
In our recent paper [1], we reported observations of photon blockade by one atom strongly coupled to an optical cavity. In support of these measurements, here we provide an expanded discussion of the general phenomenology of photon blockade as well as of the theoretical model and results that were presented in Ref. [1]. We describe the general condition for photon blockade in terms of the transmission coefficients for photon number states. For the atom-cavity system of Ref. [1], we present the model Hamiltonian and examine the relationship of the eigenvalues to the predicted intensity correlation function. We explore the effect of different driving mechanisms on the photon statistics. We also present additional corrections to the model to describe cavity birefringence and ac-Stark shifts. [1] K. M. Birnbaum, A. Boca, R. Miller, A. D. Boozer, T. E. Northup, and H. J. Kimble, Nature 436, 87 (2005).
We study the scattering problem of photon and polariton in a one-dimensional coupled-cavity system. Analytical approximate analysis and numerical simulation show that a photon can stimulate the photon emission from a polariton through polariton-photon collisions. This observation opens the possibility of photon-stimulated transition from insulating to radiative phase in a coupled-cavity QED system. Inversely, we also find that a polariton can be generated by a two-photon Raman scattering process. This paves the way towards single photon storage by the aid of atom-cavity interaction.