Unconventional photon blockade in doubly resonant microcavities with second-order nonlinearity

Abstract

It is shown that non-centrosymmetric materials with bulk second-order nonlinear susceptibility can be used to generate strongly antibunched radiation at an arbitrary wavelength, solely determined by the resonant behavior of suitably engineered coupled microcavities. The proposed scheme exploits the unconventional photon blockade of a coherent driving field at the input of a coupled cavity system, where one of the two cavities is engineered to resonate at both fundamental and second harmonic frequencies, respectively. Remarkably, the unconventional blockade mechanism occurs with reasonably low quality factors at both harmonics, and does not require a sharp doubly-resonant condition for the second cavity, thus proving its feasibility with current semiconductor technology. Introduction. There is currently pressing need for the development of integrated quantum technologies allowing for the generation and manipulation of quantum states of the electromagnetic radiation, with the ultimate goal of defining a photonic-based architecture for quantum information processing [1]. For interfacing with long distance infrastructures based on fiber-optics communication, state-of-art sources of quantum radiation have been lately developed at the typical telecommunication wavelengths, either based on heralding photons [2,3] or on artificial quantum emitters [4]. However, a source of quantum radiation that is not related to any resonant behavior of a quantum emitter, but can be engineered to operate at arbitrary wavelength and work at room temperature has not yet been realized. To this end, the single-photon blockade of a strongly nonlinear system can be exploited to convert a coherent radiation source of defined wavelength into antibunched photon streams [5], as recently done in coupled quantum dot-cavity systems [6,7], with potential implications for the realization of single-photon transistors [8] and interferometers [9].

Observation of the Unconventional Photon Blockade

“…It was first investigated for Kerr non-linearities [17,19], then for χ ð2Þ nonlinearities [20] and the Jaynes Cummings [21,22] system which we focus on here. Both the conventional and unconventional photon blockade effect result in transmitted light with vanishing photon autocorrelation g ð2Þ ð0Þ < 10 −2 [19,23]; however, the underlying physical mechanisms are completely different; see Fig.…”

Enhancement of the two-photon blockade in a strong-coupling qubit-cavity system

“…Photon blockade is usually realized through quantum nonlinear source, and there are generally two methods to realize the quantum nonlinear source. The first method is to use a highly nonlinear quantum system possessing an intrinsic nonlinear susceptibility, such as Kerr-type nonlinear medium system [8,9]. In this highly nonlinear quantum system, the required nonlinearity can be induced by a higher-order nonlinear effect [10,11].…”

Selective excitations of a Kerr-nonlinear resonator: exactly solvable approach

“…The strong photon-photon correlation in this scheme is attributed by the destructive quantum interference between distinct driven-dissipative pathways [20,21]. Based on this mechanism, many different systems are proposed to realize the unconventional photon-blockade [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], moreover three oscillatory mode systems have also been considered [30].…”