Many-Body Photon Blockade and Quantum Light Generation from Cavity Quantum Materials

TL;DR

This paper explores how cavity quantum materials can induce non-classical light properties, including many-body photon blockade, enabling new quantum light sources for computation and sensing.

Contribution

It generalizes quantum-optical input-output relations to correlated quantum materials, revealing photon antibunching and many-body photon blockade phenomena.

Findings

Demonstrates antibunching of transmitted photons as evidence of material modifications.

Shows materials near quantum critical points can realize many-body photon blockade.

Proposes cavity-embedded quantum materials as sources for quantum light and sensing.

Abstract

The strong coupling regime of photons and quantum materials inside optical cavities has emerged as a promising environment for manipulating states of matter with light. Here, in turn, we show that photons bear witness to cavity quantum-electrodynamical modifications of the material, leading to profoundly non-classical properties of light passing through the cavity. By generalizing quantum-optical input-output relations to correlated quantum materials, we study the second-order photon coherence g2(t) and demonstrate that antibunching of transmitted photons serves as direct evidence of light-induced changes to the cavity-embedded material. We show that materials near a quantum critical point can realize a collective many-body photon blockade, enabling the generation of single photons or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs via leveraging strong matter fluctuations. Our findings provide new routes for interrogating and harnessing cavity-embedded quantum materials as quantum light sources, as a resource for photon-based computation and quantum sensing.