- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review Research

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Letter
  • Open Access

Accessing strongly coupled systems without compromising them

Xiangjin Kong1,2,*, Carlos Navarrete-Benlloch3,4,5,*, and Yue Chang6,7,8,†

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: yuechang7@gmail.com
PDF

Phys. Rev. Research 7, L022024 – Published 24 April, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.L022024

Abstract

The last decades have seen a burst of experimental platforms reaching the so-called strong-coupling regime, where quantum coherent effects dominate over incoherent processes such as dissipation and thermalization. This has allowed us to create highly nontrivial quantum states and put counterintuitive quantum-mechanical effects to test well beyond what the founding fathers of quantum mechanics ever thought possible. The strong-coupling regime comes with certain challenges though: The need for a large isolation makes it difficult to access the system for control or monitoring purposes. In this Letter we propose a way to access such systems through an engineered environment that does not compromise their strong-coupling effects. As a proof of principle, we apply the approach to the photon-blockade effect present in nonlinear resonators or Kerr cavities, optomechanical systems, and the open Jaynes-Cummings model, but argue that the mechanism is quite universal. We also propose an architecture based on superconducting circuits where the required unconventional environment can be implemented, opening the way to the experimental analysis of our ideas.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References (34)

  1. J. M. Raimond, M. Brune, and S. Haroche, Manipulating quantum entanglement with atoms and photons in a cavity, Rev. Mod. Phys. 73, 565 (2001).
  2. R. Miller, T. E. Northup, K. M. Birnbaum, A. Boca, A. D. Boozer, and H. J. Kimble, Trapped atoms in cavity QED: coupling quantized light and matter, J. Phys. B: At., Mol. Opt. Phys. 38, S551 (2005).
  3. H. Walther, B. T. H. Varcoe, B.-G. Englert, and T. Becker, Cavity quantum electrodynamics, Rep. Prog. Phys. 69, 1325 (2006).
  4. D. Leibfried, R. Blatt, C. Monroe, and D. Wineland, Quantum dynamics of single trapped ions, Rev. Mod. Phys. 75, 281 (2003).
  5. C. Schneider, D. Porras, and T. Schaetz, Experimental quantum simulations of many-body physics with trapped ions, Rep. Prog. Phys. 75, 024401 (2012).
  6. D. Jaksch and P. Zoller, The cold atom Hubbard toolbox, Ann. Phys. (NY) 315, 52 (2005).
  7. I. Bloch, J. Dalibard, and W. Zwerger, Many-body physics with ultracold gases, Rev. Mod. Phys. 80, 885 (2008).
  8. M. H. Devoret and R. J. Schoelkopf, Superconducting circuits for quantum information: An outlook, Science 339, 1169 (2013).
  9. A. Blais, A. L. Grimsmo, S. M. Girvin, and A. Wallraff, Circuit quantum electrodynamics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 93, 025005 (2021).
  10. M. Aspelmeyer, T. J. Kippenberg, and F. Marquardt, Cavity optomechanics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 86, 1391 (2014).
  11. S. Hu and S. M. Weiss, Design of photonic crystal cavities for extreme light concentration, ACS Photonics 3, 1647 (2016).
  12. H. Choi, M. Heuck, and D. Englund, Self-similar nanocavity design with ultrasmall mode volume for single-photon nonlinearities, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 223605 (2017).
  13. K. Lalumière, B. C. Sanders, A. F. van Loo, A. Fedorov, A. Wallraff, and A. Blais, Input-output theory for waveguide QED with an ensemble of inhomogeneous atoms, Phys. Rev. A 88, 043806 (2013).
  14. A. Imamoglu, H. Schmidt, G. Woods, and M. Deutsch, Strongly interacting photons in a nonlinear cavity, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 1467 (1997).
  15. T. C. H. Liew and V. Savona, Single photons from coupled quantum modes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 183601 (2010).
  16. M. Bamba, A. Imamoğlu, I. Carusotto, and C. Ciuti, Origin of strong photon antibunching in weakly nonlinear photonic molecules, Phys. Rev. A 83, 021802(R) (2011).
  17. H. Flayac, D. Gerace, and V. Savona, An all-silicon single-photon source by unconventional photon blockade, Sci. Rep. 5, 11223 (2015).
  18. H. Flayac and V. Savona, Single photons from dissipation in coupled cavities, Phys. Rev. A 94, 013815 (2016).
  19. C. W. Gardiner and P. Zoller, Quantum Noise (Springer, New York, 2004).
  20. I. de Vega and D. Alonso, Dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems, Rev. Mod. Phys. 89, 015001 (2017).
  21. C. Navarrete-Benlloch, Introduction to quantum optics, arXiv:2203.13206.
  22. See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.L022024 for details about the diagonalization of the dissipative terms, the lifetime of single excitations, the analytical calculations in the weak-driving regime, the numerical simulations, the results for the Jaynes-Cummings and optomechanical couplings, and the elimination of the auxiliary modes in order to generate the model we seek.
  23. Y. Chang, A. González-Tudela, C. Sánchez Muñoz, C. Navarrete-Benlloch, and T. Shi, Deterministic down-converter and continuous photon-pair source within the bad-cavity limit, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 203602 (2016).
  24. T. Caneva, M. T. Manzoni, T. Shi, J. S. Douglas, J. I. Cirac, and D. E. Chang, Quantum dynamics of propagating photons with strong interactions: A generalized input–output formalism, New J. Phys. 17, 113001 (2015).
  25. T. Shi, D. E. Chang, and J. I. Cirac, Multiphoton-scattering theory and generalized master equations, Phys. Rev. A 92, 053834 (2015).
  26. C. Navarrete-Benlloch, Open systems dynamics: Simulating master equations in the computer, arXiv:1504.05266.
  27. H. Mabuchi, Qubit limit of cavity nonlinear optics, Phys. Rev. A 85, 015806 (2012).
  28. M. E. Reimer and C. Cher, The quest for a perfect single-photon source, Nat. Photon. 13, 734 (2019).
  29. L. Tian and H. J. Carmichael, Quantum trajectory simulations of two-state behavior in an optical cavity containing one atom, Phys. Rev. A 46, R6801 (1992).
  30. K. M. Birnbaum, A. Boca, R. Miller, A. D. Boozer, T. E. Northup, and H. J. Kimble, Photon blockade in an optical cavity with one trapped atom, Nature (London) 436, 87 (2005).
  31. T. Shi, S. Fan, and C. P. Sun, Two-photon transport in a waveguide coupled to a cavity in a two-level system, Phys. Rev. A 84, 063803 (2011).
  32. P. Rabl, Photon blockade effect in optomechanical systems, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 063601 (2011).
  33. J. D. Teufel, T. Donner, D. Li, J. W. Harlow, M. S. Allman, K. Cicak, A. J. Sirois, J. D. Whittaker, K. W. Lehnert, and R. W. Simmonds, Sideband cooling of micromechanical motion to the quantum ground state, Nature (London) 475, 359 (2011).
  34. D. S. Dovzhenko, S. V. Ryabchuk, Y. P. Rakovich, and I. R. Nabiev, Light-matter interaction in the strong coupling regime: Configurations, conditions, and applications, Nanoscale 10, 3589 (2018).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Research 7, L022024– Published 24 April, 2025
  • Received 28 April 2022
  • Revised 14 April 2024
  • Accepted 22 January 2025
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation