Nonreciprocal Photon Transmission and Amplification via Reservoir Engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general reservoir engineering method to create nonreciprocal photonic devices, enabling broadband, noise-free amplification and isolation, especially suitable for superconducting circuits and optomechanics.

Contribution

It generalizes cascaded quantum system theory to design wideband, nonreciprocal photonic devices with noise-free amplification, surpassing traditional interference-based methods.

Findings

Designed a broadband, noise-free phase-sensitive amplifier.

Achieved nonreciprocal photon transmission over wide bandwidth.

Proposed implementation in superconducting circuits and optomechanical systems.

Abstract

We discuss a general method for constructing nonreciprocal, cavity-based photonic devices, based on matching a given coherent interaction with its corresponding dissipative counterpart; our method generalizes the basic structure used in the theory of cascaded quantum systems, and can render an extremely wide class of interactions directional. In contrast to standard interference-based schemes, our approach allows directional behavior over a wide bandwidth. We show how it can be used to devise isolators and directional, quantum-limited amplifiers. We discuss in detail how this general method allows the construction of a directional, noise-free phase-sensitive amplifier that is not limited by any fundamental gain-bandwidth constraint. Our approach is particularly well-suited to implementations using superconducting microwave circuits and optomechanical systems.