Connecting steady-states of driven-dissipative photonic lattices with spontaneous collective emission phenomena

TL;DR

This paper explores the connection between steady-states in driven-dissipative photonic lattices and spontaneous collective emission phenomena, revealing how subradiant states relate to light localization and anti-localization, guiding future experiments.

Contribution

It establishes a formal link between spontaneous emission phenomena and driven steady-states in photonic lattices, predicting novel localization behaviors in these systems.

Findings

Subradiant emitter configurations lead to steady-state light localization.

Configurations causing anti-localization distribute light outside the driven region.

Results explain recent observations of optically-defined cavities in polaritonic lattices.

Abstract

Recent experimental advances enable the fabrication of photonic lattices in which the light propagates with non-trivial energy dispersions. When interfaced with quantum emitters, such systems yield strong collective spontaneous emission phenomena, such as perfect sub-radiance, in which the decay into the bath is completely suppressed, forming bound-states-in-the-continuum. Since such photonic lattices are generally lossy, an alternative way of probing them consists in coherently driving them to an steady-state from which photoluminescence can be extracted. Here, we formalize connections between these two seemingly different situations and use that intuition to predict the formation of non-trivial photonic steady-states in one and two dimensions. In particular, we show that subradiant emitter configurations are linked to the emergence of steady-state light-localization in the driven-dissipative setting, in which the light features the same form than the spontaneously formed bound-states-in-the-continuum. Besides, we also find configurations which leads to the opposite behaviour, an anti-localization of light, that is, it distributes over all the system except for the region defined between the driving lasers. These results shed light on the recently reported optically-defined cavities in polaritonic lattices, and can guide further experimental studies.