Photonic currents in driven and dissipative resonator lattices

Abstract

Arrays of coupled photonic cavities driven by external lasers represent a highly controllable setup to explore photonic transport. In this paper we address (quasi)-steady states of this system that exhibit photonic currents introduced by engineering driving and dissipation. We investigate two approaches: in the first one, photonic currents arise as a consequence of a phase difference of applied lasers and, in the second one, photons are injected locally and currents develop as they redistribute over the lattice. Effects of interactions are taken into account within a mean-field framework. In the first approach, we find that the current exhibits a resonant behavior with respect to the driving frequency. Weak interactions shift the resonant frequency toward higher values, while in the strongly interacting regime in our mean-field treatment the effect stems from multiphotonic resonances of a single driven cavity. For the second approach, we show that the overall lattice current can be controlled by incorporating few cavities with stronger dissipation rates into the system. These cavities serve as sinks for photonic currents and their effect is maximal at the onset of quantum Zeno dynamics.