Fast Optomechanical Photon Blockade

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control scheme for optomechanical systems that enables rapid preparation of photon-blockaded states by exploiting destructive interference, significantly reducing the preparation time compared to existing methods.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel control scheme leveraging destructive interference to achieve faster photon blockade in optomechanical systems, surpassing previous steady-state approaches.

Findings

Preparation time limited only by optomechanical interaction strength

Achieves orders of magnitude faster photon blockade

Potential for high-fidelity single-photon sources

Abstract

The photon blockade effect is commonly exploited in the development of single-photon sources. While the photon blockade effect could be used to prepare high-fidelity single-photon states in idealized regimes, practical implementations in optomechanical systems suffer from an interplay of competing processes. Here we derive a control scheme that exploits destructive interference of Fock state amplitudes of more than one photon. The resulting preparation time for photon-blockaded quantum states is limited only by the optomechanical interaction strength and can thus be orders of magnitude shorter than in existing schemes that achieve photon-blockaded state in the steady state.