Photon blockade with ground-state neutral atoms

Abstract

We show that induced dipole-dipole interactions allow for photon blockade in subwavelength ensembles of two-level, ground-state neutral atoms. Our protocol relies on the energy shift of the single-excitation, superradiant state of $N$ atoms, which can be engineered to yield an effective two-level system. A coherent pump induces Rabi oscillation between the ground state and a collective bright state, with at most a single excitation shared among all atoms. The possibility of using clock transitions that are long-lived and relatively robust against stray fields, alongside new prospects on experiments with subwavelength lattices, makes our proposal a promising alternative for quantum information protocols.

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Coherent Quantum Optical Control with Subwavelength Resolution
• Subradiant Bell states in distant atomic arrays
• Cooperative effects and disorder: A scaling analysis of the spectrum of the effective atomic Hamiltonian
• A superatom picture of collective nonclassical light emission and dipole blockade in atom arrays
• Addressing individual atoms in optical lattices with standing-wave driving fields
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• A superatom picture of collective nonclassical light emission and dipole blockade in atom arrays