Generation of nonclassical light by nonlinear cavities

Abstract

It has recently been shown that multiphoton absorption in cavities containing an emitter and a nonlinear mirror or a two photon absorber can be used to create antibunched photons (i.e. nonclassical light). We investigate the generation of nonclassical photon states using nonlinear laser cavities where the excitation has been modified so that it consists of short current pulses. The light fields in the studied setups are ideally formed of superpositions of zero photon and one photon states. Our goal is to study and develop single photon sources which are needed e.g. in quantum information processing and quantum computing, and fundamental quantum optical experiments. We investigate the effect of exciting the photon emitter with time dependent current pulses to provide single-photon-on-demand sources. We maximize the probability of the single photon state by optimizing the strengths of linear losses, nonlinear absorption, photon emission, and the length of the current injection pulse into the amplifier. Furthermore, we analyze the output photon statistics and waiting times using Monte Carlo simulations. This type of a setup is technologically attractive since it potentially provides room temperature realization of photon antibunching with essentially standard optoelectronic materials and processing techniques.