Interaction-induced photon blockade using an atomically thin mirror embedded in a microcavity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that embedding an atomically thin semiconductor in a microcavity can produce narrow, resilient bright resonances enabling strong photon antibunching, advancing solid-state quantum photonics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme using atomically thin semiconductors in microcavities to achieve narrow resonances and photon blockade without requiring long-lived atomic states.

Findings

Narrow dark and bright resonances can be achieved in transmission.

Bright resonances are resilient against disorder when tuned appropriately.

Strong photon antibunching occurs even with weak interactions.

Abstract

Narrow dark resonances associated with electromagnetically induced transparency play a key role in enhancing photon-photon interactions. The schemes realized to date relied on the existence of long-lived atomic states with strong van der Waals interactions. Here, we show that by placing an atomically thin semiconductor with ultra-fast radiative decay rate inside a \textcolor{black}{0D} cavity, it is possible to obtain narrow dark or bright resonances in transmission whose width could be much smaller than that of the cavity and bare exciton decay rates. While breaking of translational invariance places a limit on the width of the dark resonance width, it is possible to obtain a narrow bright resonance that is resilient against disorder by tuning the cavity away from the excitonic transition. Resonant excitation of this bright resonance yields strong photon antibunching even in the limit where the interaction strength is arbitrarily smaller than the non-Markovian disorder broadening and the radiative decay rate of the bare exciton. Our findings suggest that atomically thin semiconductors could pave the way for realization of strongly interacting photonic systems in the solid-state.