Single photons and unconventional photon blockade in quantum dot cavity-QED

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the unconventional photon blockade effect in quantum dot cavity QED operating in the weak coupling regime, showing polarization-dependent photon correlations and phase-to-amplitude squeezing transitions.

Contribution

It reports the first observation of unconventional photon blockade in quantum dot cavity QED with weak coupling, utilizing polarization tuning to control photon statistics.

Findings

Minimum $g^{(2)}(0)\approx0.37$ observed

Photon bunching and anti-bunching depend on polarization

Transition from phase to amplitude squeezing detected

Abstract

We observe the unconventional photon blockade effect in quantum dot cavity QED, which, in contrast to conventional photon blockade, operates in the weak coupling regime. A single quantum dot transition is simultaneously coupled to two orthogonally polarized optical cavity modes, and by careful tuning of the input and output state of polarization, the unconventional photon blockade effect is observed. We find a minimum second-order correlation $g^{(2)}(0)\approx0.37$ which corresponds to $g^{(2)}(0)\approx0.005$ when corrected for detector jitter, and observe the expected polarization dependency and photon bunching and anti-bunching very close-by in parameter space, which indicates the abrupt change from phase to amplitude squeezing.