Unconventional single-photon blockade in non-Markovian systems

Abstract

The photon blockade based on weak nonlinearities is called unconventional photon blockade. The studies of the unconventional photon blockade in recent decades are all limited to Markovian approximation. In this paper, we propose a scheme to achieve a strong photon antibunching in non-Markovian reservoir. An exact non-Markovian master equation for the optical cavity coupled with a degenerate optical parametric amplifier (DOPA) is derived. We show that this unconventional photon blockade originates from the destructive interference between two paths which are formed by the DOPA pump and a driving field. Unconventional single-photon blockades that exhibit a transition from the non-Markovian to Markovian regime by controlling environmental spectral width regardless of the weakness of DOPA gain and driving field are found. We analytically derive an optimal condition for strong antibunching, which is in good agreement with that obtained by the full numerical simulation. The presented results then are compared with that given by Markovian approximation in the weak-coupling limit. Our scheme might have paved an avenue towards the investigations of unconventional photon blockades in many other non-Markovian quantum systems in quantum optics.