Giant Enhancement of Unconventional Photon Blockade in a Dimer Chain

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that unconventional photon blockade can be significantly enhanced in a chain of coupled resonators, reducing the nonlinearity needed for multi-photon suppression and enabling better control of quantum states.

Contribution

It reveals that the nonlinearity threshold for photon blockade decreases exponentially with lattice size in coupled resonator chains, supported by analytic and simulation results.

Findings

Photon blockade strength increases exponentially with chain length.

Analytic derivation matches wavefunction Monte Carlo simulations.

Lattice design enables improved control of multi-photon states.

Abstract

Unconventional photon blockade refers to the suppression of multi-photon states in weakly nonlinear optical resonators via the destructive interference of different excitation pathways. It has been studied in a pair of coupled nonlinear resonators and other few-mode systems. Here, we show that unconventional photon blockade can be greatly enhanced in a chain of coupled resonators. Specifically, the strength of the nonlinearity in each resonator needed to achieve unconventional photon blockade is suppressed exponentially with lattice size. The analytic derivation, based on a weak drive approximation, is validated by wavefunction Monte Carlo simulations. These findings show that customized lattices of coupled resonators can be powerful tools for controlling multi-photon quantum states.