Nanoscale continuous quantum light sources based on driven dipole emitter arrays

TL;DR

This paper explores nanoscale quantum light sources using driven dipole emitter arrays, demonstrating strong directional emission and non-classical photon statistics due to collective effects and dipole interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate non-classical, directional quantum light at the nanoscale using regular arrays of two-level emitters with strong dipole coupling.

Findings

Directional confinement of emitted fields with quantum properties.

Superradiant emission enhances radiated intensity significantly.

Maintains antibunching at the level of g^{(2)}(0) ≈ 10^{-2}.

Abstract

Regular arrays of two-level emitters at distances smaller that the transition wavelength collectively scatter, absorb and emit photons. The strong inter-particle dipole coupling creates large energy shifts of the collective delocalized excitations, which generates a highly nonlinear response at the single and few photon level. This should allow to implement nanoscale non-classical light sources via weak coherent illumination. At the generic tailored examples of regular chains or polygons we show that the fields emitted perpendicular to the illumination direction exhibit a strong directional confinement with genuine quantum properties as antibunching. For short interparticle distances superradiant directional emission can enhance the radiated intensity by an order of magnitude compared to a single atom focused to a strongly confined solid angle but still keeping the anti-bunching parameter at the level of $g^{(2)}(0) \approx 10^{-2}$.