Antibunching via cooling by heating

Abstract

We investigate statistics of the photon (phonon) field undergoing linear and nonlinear damping processes. An effective two-photon (phonon) nonlinear "cooling by heating" process is realized from linear damping by spectral filtering of the heat baths present in the system. This cooling process driven by incoherent quantum thermal noise can create quantum states of the photon field. In fact, for high temperatures of the spectrally filtered heat baths, sub-Poissonian statistics with strong antibunching in the photon (phonon) field are reported. This notion of the emergence and control of quantumness by incoherent thermal quantum noise is applied to a quantum system comprising of a two-level system and a harmonic oscillator or analogous optomechanical setting. Our analysis may provide a promising direction for the preparation and protection of quantum features via nonlinear damping that can be controlled with incoherent thermal quantum noise.