Climbing the Jaynes-Cummings ladder by photon counting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel photon counting method to directly observe Jaynes-Cummings nonlinearities in dissipative cavity QED systems, enabling explicit detection of higher ladder rungs despite high losses.

Contribution

The authors develop a new approach using resonant excitation to unambiguously detect quantum nonlinearities in strongly dissipative cavity QED systems.

Findings

Resonant excitation of detuned emitters reveals Jaynes-Cummings nonlinearities.

The method works in systems with high dissipation and strong light-matter coupling.

Explicit evidence of higher Jaynes-Cummings ladder rungs is demonstrated.

Abstract

We present a new method to observe direct experimental evidence of Jaynes--Cummings nonlinearities in a strongly dissipative cavity quantum electrodynamics system, where large losses compete with the strong light-matter interaction. This is a highly topical problem, particularly for quantum dots in microcavities where transitions from higher rungs of the Jaynes--Cummings ladder remain to be evidenced explicitly. We compare coherent and incoherent excitations of the system and find that resonant excitation of the detuned emitter make it possible to unambiguously evidence few photon quantum nonlinearities in currently available experimental systems.