2024/11/13 by Benjamin Kass, Kass, Benjamin, Spenser Talkington +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.08964
openalex publication_date 2024/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The strong coupling regime of photons and quantum materials inside optical cavities has emerged as a promising environment for manipulating states of matter with light. Here, in turn, we show that photons bear witness to cavity quantum-electrodynamical modifications of the material, leading to profoundly non-classical properties of light passing through the cavity. By generalizing quantum-optical input-output relations to correlated quantum materials, we study the second-order photon coherence g2(t) and demonstrate that antibunching of transmitted photons serves as direct evidence of light-induced changes to the cavity-embedded material. We show that materials near a quantum critical point can realize a collective many-body photon blockade, enabling the generation of single photons or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs via leveraging strong matter fluctuations. Our findings provide new routes for interrogating and harnessing cavity-embedded quantum materials as quantum light sources, as a resource for photon-based computation and quantum sensing.