Triply Resonant Photonic Crystal Nanobeam Cavities for Unconditional Photon Blockade

TL;DR

This paper explores the design and feasibility of triply resonant silicon photonic nanobeam cavities for unconditional single-photon blockade, enabling scalable quantum photonic technologies with minimal nonlinearities.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of triply resonant nanobeam cavities to achieve photon blockade in silicon photonics, with detailed design constraints and a proposed experimental protocol.

Findings

Achievable quality factors around 10^7

Effective mode volumes near 10^{-2} μm^3

Feasible experimental conditions for single-photon generation

Abstract

The development of many scalable quantum technologies requires single-photon nonlinearity, such as single-photon blockade, in solid-state systems. Recently, it has been shown that single-photon Fock states can, in principle, be unconditionally generated using arbitrarily small intrinsic optical nonlinearities in photonic cavities. We investigate the feasibility of such a scheme in achieving photon blockade in an on-chip silicon photonics platform. We show that a triply resonant nanobeam cavity pumped with three monochromatic lasers could achieve such functionalities with quality factors $\sim 10^7$ and effective mode volumes $\sim 10^{-2} \mu m^3$, for experimentally feasible incident powers. Using quantum optical simulations, we propose an experimental protocol to generate single photons under this scheme. The constraints on the cavity design and experimental conditions are thoroughly explored to determine feasible regimes of operation.