Long-lived photon blockade with weak optical nonlinearity (opens in new tab)

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 to this approach is the very short antibunching time window, orders of magnitude less than the cavity lifetime. We present a scheme to achieve photon blockade over a large time window of ...