We discuss the excitation of polaritons---strongly-coupled states of light and matter---by quantum light, instead of the usual laser or thermal excitation. As one illustration of the new horizons thus opened, we introduce Mollow spectroscopy, a theor
etical concept for a spectroscopic technique that consists in scanning the output of resonance fluorescence onto an optical target, from which weak nonlinearities can be read with high precision even in strongly dissipative environments.
We study an array of dissipative tunnel-coupled cavities, each interacting with an incoherently pumped two-level emitter. For cavities in the lasing regime, we find correlations between the light fields of distant cavities, despite the dissipation an
d the incoherent nature of the pumping mechanism. These correlations decay exponentially with distance for arrays in any dimension but become increasingly long ranged with increasing photon tunneling between adjacent cavities. The interaction-dominated and the tunneling-dominated regimes show markedly different scaling of the correlation length which always remains finite due to the finite photon trapping time. We propose a series of observables to characterize the spontaneous build-up of collective coherence in the system.
We propose and characterize a two-photon emitter in a highly polarised, monochromatic and directional beam, realized by means of a quantum dot embedded in a linearly polarized cavity. In our scheme, the cavity frequency is tuned to half the frequency
of the biexciton (two excitons with opposite spins) and largely detuned from the excitons thanks to the large biexciton binding energy. We show how the emission can be Purcell enhanced by several orders of magnitude into the two-photon channel for available experimental systems.
We study a two-level system (atom, superconducting qubit or quantum dot) strongly coupled to the single photonic mode of a cavity, in the presence of incoherent pumping and including detuning and dephasing. This system displays a striking quantum to
classical transition. On the grounds of several approximations that reproduce to various degrees exact results obtained numerically, we separate five regimes of operations, that we term linear, quantum, lasing, quenching and thermal. In the fully quantized picture, the lasing regime arises as a condensation of dressed states and manifests itself as a Mollow triplet structure in the direct emitter photoluminescence spectrum, which embeds fundamental features of the full-field quantization description of light-matter interactions.
