Long-Lived Photon Blockade with Weak Optical Nonlinearity

Abstract

In conventional photon blockade, the occupation of a cavity mode by more than one photon is suppressed via strong optical nonlinearity. An alternative, called unconventional photon blockade, can occur under weak nonlinearity by relying on quantum interference between fine-tuned cavities. A serious limitation is the very short antibunching time window, orders of magnitude less than the cavity lifetime. We present a method to achieve photon blockade over a large time window of several cavity lifetimes, even exceeding that of conventional photon blockade, while still requiring only weak nonlinearity. This ``long-lived photon blockade'' (LLPB) occurs when the single-photon Green's function exhibits a zero at a large cavity loss rate, which is satisfied by an exemplary configuration of four coupled cavities under weak driving. Our analytical results agree well with wavefunction Monte Carlo simulations. The LLPB phenomenon may aid the development of single-photon sources utilizing materials with weak optical nonlinearities.