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Photon blockade, in analogy to Coulomb's or phonon blockades, is a phenomenon when a single photon in a nonlinear cavity blocks the transmission of a second photon. This effect can occur in Kerr-type systems driven by a laser due to strong nonlinear photon-photon interactions. We predict the occurrence of higher-order photon blockades where the transmission of more than two photons is effectively blocked by single- and two-photon states. This photon blockade can be achieved by tuning the frequency of the laser driving field to be equal to the sum of the Kerr nonlinearity and the cavity resonance frequency. We refer to this phenomenon as two-photon blockade or two-photon state truncation via nonlinear scissors, and can also be interpreted as photon-induced tunneling. We also show that, for a driving-field frequency fulfilling another resonance condition and for higher strengths of the driving field, even a three-photon blockade can occur but less clearly than in the case of single- and two-photon blockades. We demonstrate how various photon blockades can be identified by analyzing photon-number correlations, coherence and entropic properties, Wigner functions, and spectra of squeezing. We show that two- and three-photon blockades can, in principle, be observed in various cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamical systems for which the standard single-photon blockade was observed without the need of using higher-order driving interactions or Kerr media exhibiting higher-order nonlinear susceptibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-photon devices at microwave frequencies are important for applications in quantum information processing and communication in the microwave regime. In this work we describe a proposal of a multioutput single-photon device. We consider two superconducting resonators coupled to a gap-tunable qubit via both its longitudinal and transverse degrees of freedom. Thus, this qubit-resonator coupling differs from the coupling in standard circuit quantum-electrodynamic systems described by the Jaynes-Cummings model. We demonstrate that an effective quadratic coupling between one of the normal modes and the qubit can be induced and this induced second-order nonlinearity is much larger than that for conventional Kerr-type systems exhibiting photon blockade. Assuming that a coupled normal mode is resonantly driven, we observe that the output fields from the resonators exhibit strong sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics and photon antibunching. Contrary to previous studies on resonant photon blockade, the first-excited state of our device is a pure single-photon Fock state rather than a polariton state, i.e., a highly hybridized qubit-photon state. In addition, it is found that the optical state truncation caused by the strong qubit-induced nonlinearity can lead to an entanglement between the two resonators, even in their steady state under the Markov approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A strong photon-photon nonlinear interaction is a necessary condition for a photon blockade. Moreover, this nonlinearity can also result in a bistable behavior in the cavity field. We analyze the relation between the detecting field and the photon blockade in a superconducting circuit-QED system, and show that a photon blockade cannot occur when the detecting field is in the bistable regime. This photon blockade is the microwave-photonics analog of the Coulomb blockade. We further demonstrate that the photon transmission through such a system can be controlled (from photon blockade to transparency) by the detecting field. Numerical calculations show that our proposal is experimentally realizable with current technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]