Nonlinear Optics Mediated by Chiral Waveguide QED: Generation of Momentum-anticorrelated Photon Pairs

Abstract

In recent years, chiral quantum optics has emerged as an active research area due to the promising applications in quantum information processing as well as nonlinear optics. We present results on the properties of the incoherent component of the transmitted light after transmons chirally coupled to a waveguide. The well-known resonance fluorescence of one chiral transmon resembles nonlinear quantum optics as it can convert the coherent light, with photons having spatially extensive coherence and Poisson distribution, into a field with spatially localized coherence and bunching photon statistics. However, another chiral transmon can undo the effect of the first transmon regardless of the Rabi frequency under the idealization involved in this work. A full wavefunction calculation shows that, in the weak driving limit, this incoherent light mainly comes from two-photon processes - one chiral transmon converts two independent photons into a photon pair with opposite momentum shift. In addition to the driving through the waveguide, a local driving with independently tunable amplitude and phase can address each transmon individually. The interplay between the waveguide driving and local driving modulates the contribution of the incoherent transmission and hence enables the engineering of the quantum statistics of the transmitted field, with tunable $g^{(2)}(0)$ spanning anti-bunched, coherent, and strongly bunched regimes.