Two-photon and three-photon blockades in driven nonlinear systems

Abstract

Photon blockade, in analogy to Coulomb's or phonon blockades, is a phenomenon when a single photon in a nonlinear cavity blocks the transmission of a second photon. This effect can occur in Kerr-type systems driven by a laser due to strong nonlinear photon-photon interactions. We predict the occurrence of higher-order photon blockades where the transmission of more than two photons is effectively blocked by single- and two-photon states. This photon blockade can be achieved by tuning the frequency of the laser driving field to be equal to the sum of the Kerr nonlinearity and the cavity resonance frequency. We refer to this phenomenon as two-photon blockade or two-photon state truncation via nonlinear scissors, and can also be interpreted as photon-induced tunneling. We also show that, for a driving-field frequency fulfilling another resonance condition and for higher strengths of the driving field, even a three-photon blockade can occur but less clearly than in the case of single- and two-photon blockades. We demonstrate how various photon blockades can be identified by analyzing photon-number correlations, coherence and entropic properties, Wigner functions, and spectra of squeezing. We show that two- and three-photon blockades can, in principle, be observed in various cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamical systems for which the standard single-photon blockade was observed without the need of using higher-order driving interactions or Kerr media exhibiting higher-order nonlinear susceptibility.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Multiphoton blockades in pulsed regimes beyond stationary limits

“…In this way, we demonstrate, that contrarily to common expectations, the results obtained in the pulsed regime considerably differ from those derived for the monochromatic driving [16]. More importantly, we see that PB in Kerr-type systems under pulsed excitation can be controlled by shape of pulses.…”

“…It is interesting to compare these results with the solutions obtained for the Kerr nonlinear resonator with cw driving field. It has been shown numerically [16] that in the case of cw-excitation the maximum rate of the population P 1 reach only to 0.5 for k = 1 and approximately equals to the population of vacuum state P 0 . The limit 0.5 for P 1 has been also obtained by analytical calculations in the previous section.…”

“…This approach allows to expand the mechanism of PB for the case of producing few-photon pulses at deterministic time intervals. Thus, we present comparative analysis of one-photon, two-photon and three-photon blockades in the pulsed regimes in addition to the results obtained for the case of PB in cw driving field [16].…”

“…In this respect, strong nonlinearities on the few-photon level can be produced by interaction between photons and an atom in a cavity [6][7][8][9], in systems with interacting photons or polaritons in arrays of cavities coupled to atoms or qubits [10][11][12][13], in optomechanical systems and Kerr type nonlinear cavities [14][15][16].…”

Controlling photon transport in the single-photon weak-coupling regime of cavity optomechanics

“…For example, the photon blockade resulting from the nonlinearity is employed in single-photon (few-photon) transmission control [2] and optical state truncation [3]. Similarly, photon blockade is also an important feature in a lot of quantum device design such as fast two-qubit controlled-NOT gate [4], efficient quantum repeaters [5], single-photon transistor [6] and optical quantum computer [7].…”