Strong photon antibunching in weakly nonlinear two-dimensional exciton-polaritons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates strong photon antibunching in a hybrid system of 2D materials and photonic cavities, offering a scalable approach for quantum photonics despite weak nonlinearity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid platform combining 2D materials with photonic crystals and shows how to achieve strong antibunching by patterning the 2D material.

Findings

Photon antibunching achieved with $g^{(2)}(0) \sim 10^{-3}$

Multiple mechanisms for antibunching identified

System can transition from coherent to strongly antibunched states

Abstract

A deterministic and scalable array of single photon nonlinearities in the solid state holds great potential for both fundamental physics and technological applications, but its realization has proved extremely challenging. Despite significant advances, leading candidates such as quantum dots and group III-V quantum wells have yet to overcome their respective bottlenecks in random positioning and weak nonlinearity. Here we consider a hybrid light-matter platform, marrying an atomically thin two-dimensional material to a photonic crystal cavity, and analyze its second-order coherence function. We identify several mechanisms for photon antibunching under different system parameters, including one characterized by large dissipation and weak nonlinearity. Finally, we show that by patterning the two-dimensional material into different sizes, we can drive our system dynamics from a coherent state into a regime of strong antibunching with $g^{(2)}(0) \sim 10^{-3}$, opening a possible route to building scalable, on-chip quantum simulators.