Highly nonclassical phonon emission statistics through two-phonon loss of van der Pol oscillator

Abstract

The ability to produce a nonclassical wave in a system is essential for advances in quantum communication and computation. Here, we propose a scheme to generate highly nonclassical phonon emission statistics—an antibunched wave in a quantum van der Pol (vdP) oscillator subject to external driving, both single- and two-phonon losses. It is found that phonon antibunching depends significantly on the nonlinear two-phonon loss of the vdP oscillator, where the degree of the antibunching increases monotonically with the two-phonon loss, and the distinguished parameter regimes with optimal antibunching and single-phonon emission are identified clearly. In addition, we give an in-depth insight into strong antibunching in the emitted phonon statistics by analytical calculations using a three-oscillator-level model, which agree well with the full numerical simulations employing both a master-equation approach and a Schrödinger-equation approach at weak driving. In turn, the fluorescence phonon emission spectra of the vdP oscillator, given by the power spectral density, are also evaluated. We further show that high phonon emission amplitudes, simultaneously accompanied by strong phonon antibunching, are attainable in the vdP system, which are beneficial to the correlation measurement in practical experiments. Our approach only requires a single vdP oscillator, without the need for reconfiguring the two coupled nonlinear resonators or the complex nanophononic structures as compared to the previous blockade schemes. The present scheme could inspire methods to achieve antibunching in other systems.