Antibunched photons from inelastic Cooper-pair tunneling

Abstract

We demonstrate theoretically that charge transport across a Josephson junction, voltage-biased through a resistive environment, produces antibunched photons. We develop a continuous-mode description of the emitted radiation field in a semi-infinite transmission line terminated by the Josephson junction. Within a perturbative treatment in powers of the tunneling coupling across the Josephson junction, we capture effects originating in charging dynamics of consecutively tunneling Cooper pairs. We find that within a feasible experimental setup the Coulomb blockade provided by high zero-frequency impedance can be used to create antibunched photons at a very high rate and in a very versatile frequency window ranging from a few GHz to a THz.