Engineering Gaussian states of light from a planar microcavity

Mathias Van Regemortel; Sylvain Ravets; Atac Imamoglu; Iacopo Carusotto; Michiel Wouters

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Engineering Gaussian states of light from a planar microcavity

by Mathias Van Regemortel, Sylvain Ravets, Atac Imamoglu, Iacopo Carusotto, Michiel Wouters

This Submission thread is now published as

SciPost Phys. 5, 013 (2018)

Submission summary

As Contributors:	Mathias Van Regemortel
Arxiv Link:	https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.08012v3 (pdf)
Date accepted:	2018-06-01
Date submitted:	2018-05-29 02:00
Submitted by:	Van Regemortel, Mathias
Submitted to:	SciPost Physics
Academic field:	Physics
Specialties:	Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics - Theory Quantum Physics
Approach:	Theoretical

Abstract

Quantum fluids of light in a nonlinear planar microcavity can exhibit antibunched photon statistics at short distances due to repulsive polariton interactions. We show that, despite the weakness of the nonlinearity, the antibunching signal can be amplified orders of magnitude with an appropriate free-space optics scheme to select and interfere output modes. Our results are understood from the unconventional photon blockade perspective by analyzing the approximate Gaussian output state of the microcavity. In a second part, we illustrate how the temporal and spatial profile of the density-density correlation function of a fluid of light can be reconstructed with free-space optics. Also here the nontrivial (anti)bunching signal can be amplified significantly by shaping the light emitted by the microcavity.

Ontology / Topics

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Antibunching Density-density correlations Optical cavities Photon blockade Polaritons

Published as SciPost Phys. 5, 013 (2018)

Author comments upon resubmission

We admit that our previous analysis of dephasing was inaccurate and we would like to thank the referee for noticing this. However, we do not see the purpose of performing a hard-core simulation of the master equation for this model, which is continuous and contains a high number of particles in the condensate mode. In the new analysis, we point out that the primary effect of dephasing would be a scattering of condensate particles with phonons to nonzero momentum modes. We obtain this by evaluating the effect of the dephasing jump operator upon the system with Lindbladian dynamics. We also estimate the impact of this spurious effect, but we were unable to find accurate measures of the dephasing rate of a polariton system in the literature. In any case, a pulsed excitation scheme is a way to circumvent this problem.

We hope that the referee is now willing to accept our work for publication in SciPost with this new analysis.