Collective enhancement of photon blockade via two-photon interactions

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Dong, Lijuan and Jayesh Shah, Aanal and Kirton, Peter and Alaeian, Hadiseh and Felicetti, Simone (2026) Collective enhancement of photon blockade via two-photon interactions. PRX Quantum, 7 (2). 020349. ISSN 2691-3399 (https://doi.org/10.1103/l477-z8jr)

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Abstract

Photon blockade—the suppression of multiphoton transmission by quantum nonlinearities—enables on-demand nonclassical light, but it typically requires strong single-emitter coupling and does not improve by simply adding more emitters. We show that this limitation can be overcome when an ensemble of N identical two-level emitters couples to a single cavity mode through a two-photon exchange interaction. Using input-output theory together with a hierarchy of open-system descriptions (exact numerics, a Holstein-Primakoff model, and an approximated analytical treatment), we characterize the steady-state transmission and photon statistics of the two-photon Tavis-Cummings model. We find that blockade is collectively enhanced: the optimal antibunching improves with atom number (1/N scaling of the second-order correlation function) while maintaining near-unit transmission, eliminating the usual brightness-purity trade-off of interference-based weak-coupling schemes. We further identify driving configurations that yield collectively enhanced two-photon blockade, with strong suppression of higher-order autocorrelation functions that deepens with increasing N . The nonclassicality is ultimately limited by decoherence, with emitter dephasing providing the dominant constraint. These results establish collective two-photon light-matter coupling as a scalable route to photon blockade in platforms where individual strong coupling is not achievable.

ORCID iDs

Dong, Lijuan, Jayesh Shah, Aanal, Kirton, Peter ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3915-1098, Alaeian, Hadiseh and Felicetti, Simone;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:96358
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    3 June 2026
    Published
    7 April 2026
    Accepted
    Subjects:Science > Physics
    Department:Faculty of Science > Physics
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:27 May 2026 11:02
    Last modified:30 Jun 2026 11:14
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/96358
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