Electrically tunable quantum correlations of dipolar polaritons with micrometer-scale blockade radii

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates electrically tunable, strong nonlinear photon interactions in dipolar polaritons on a chip, with large blockade radii and reconfigurable interactions, advancing scalable quantum photonic technologies.

Contribution

It introduces electrically tunable partial photon blockade in dipolar waveguide polaritons with large blockade radii, enabling scalable and reconfigurable quantum photonic circuits.

Findings

Dipolar polaritons exhibit two-orders-of-magnitude stronger nonlinearity.

Dipolar blockade radius exceeds 4 micrometers, larger than optical wavelength.

Electrical tuning allows local control of dipolar interactions.

Abstract

An extreme yet reconfigurable nonlinear response to a single photon by a photonic system is crucial for realizing a universal two-photon gate, an elementary building block for photonic quantum computing. Yet such a response, characterized by the photon blockade effect, has only been achieved in atomic systems or solid states ones that are difficult to scale up. Here we demonstrate electrically tunable partial photon blockade in dipolar waveguide polaritons on a semiconductor chip, measured via photon-correlations. Remarkably, these "dipolar photons" display a two-orders-of-magnitude stronger nonlinearity compared to unpolarized polaritons, with an extracted dipolar blockade radius up to more than 4 $\mu$m, significantly larger than the optical wavelength, and comparable to that of atomic Rydberg polaritons. Furthermore, we show that the dipolar interaction can be electrically switched and locally configured by simply tuning the gate voltage. Finally we show that with a simple modification of the design, a full photon blockade is expected, setting a new route towards scalable, reconfigurable, chip-integrated quantum photonic circuits with strong two-photon nonlinearities.