Single-photon nonlinearities and blockade from a strongly driven photonic molecule

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a strongly driven coupled ring resonator system can achieve single-photon nonlinearities and blockade effects, enabling quantum photonic functionalities without needing low-volume confinement.

Contribution

It introduces a triply resonant integrated photonic device that achieves single-photon nonlinearities using intrinsic material nonlinearities and strong driving, without requiring low-volume confinement.

Findings

Strong antibunching observed at the output indicating photon blockade.

Achieved nonlinear quantum regime in a standard material platform.

Demonstrated control of photon statistics via strong resonant driving.

Abstract

Achieving the regime of single-photon nonlinearities in photonic devices just exploiting the intrinsic high-order susceptibilities of conventional materials would open the door to practical semiconductor-based quantum photonic technologies. Here we show that this regime can be achieved in a triply resonant integrated photonic device made of two coupled ring resonators, without necessarily requiring low volume confinement, in a material platform displaying an intrinsic third-order nonlinearity. By strongly driving one of the three resonances of the system, a weak coherent probe at one of the others results in a strongly suppressed two-photon probability at the output, evidenced by antibunched second-order correlation function at zero-time delay under continuous wave driving.