Strong Photon Blockade Mediated by Optical Stark Shift in a Single-Atom-Cavity System
Abstract
We propose a theoretical scheme to achieve strong photon blockade via a single atom in a cavity. By utilizing the optical Stark shift, the dressed-state splitting between the higher and lower branches is enhanced, which results in a significant increase in the lower (higher) branch and a decrease in the higher (lower) branch for a negative (positive) Stark shift, and dominates the time evolution of the photon-number oscillations as well. Furthermore, two-photon excitation is suppressed via quantum interference for the optimal phase and Rabi frequency of an external microwave field. It is shown that the interplay between quantum interference and the enhanced vacuum Rabi splitting gives rise to a strong photon blockade that can be used to realize a high-quality single-photon source beyond the regime of strong atom-cavity coupling. In particular, by tuning the optical Stark shift, the second-order correlation function in our scheme can be made three orders of magnitude smaller than in the Jaynes-Cummings model, and, correspondingly, a large cavity photon number appears as well. Our proposal may imply exciting opportunities for potential applications in quantum networks and quantum information processing.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review Applied
- Pub Date:
- October 2019
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.12.044065
- Bibcode:
- 2019PhRvP..12d4065T