Photon–photon correlations with a V-type three-level system interacting with two quantized field modes

Abstract

We carry out a model study on the interaction of a $V$-type three-level emitter with two quantized cavity modes which are weakly driven by two classical fields. The emitter may be an atom or a molecule with nondegenerate upper levels in general. The lifetimes of the two upper levels are assumed to be much longer than the lifetime of the cavity photons. We calculate the two-time second order coherence function, namely Hanbury Brown-Twiss function $g^{(2)}(\tau)$ where $\tau$ is the time delay between the two modes. We analyze the photon-photon correlations between the two cavity modes in terms of $g^{(2)}(\tau)$. The variation of $g^{(2)}(\tau)$ as a function of $\tau$ exhibits collapse and revival type oscillations as well as quantum beats for relatively short $\tau$ while in the limit $\tau \rightarrow \infty$, $g^{(2)}(\tau) \simeq 1$. We further show that the two cavity field modes are entangled when $g^{(2)}(0) > 2$. We develop a dressed state picture with single photon in each mode to explain the results and use the negativity of the partial transpose of the reduced field density matrix to show the entanglement between field modes. The model presented in this paper may be useful for generating entangled photon pairs, and also manipulating photon-photon correlations with a cavity QED set up.