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Single-photon emission from a two-level system offers promising perspectives for the development of quantum technologies, where multiphotons are generally regarded as accidental, undesired and should be suppressed. In quantum mechanics, however, multiphoton emission can turn out to be even more fundamental and interesting than the single-photon emission, since in a coherently driven system, the multiphoton suppression arises from quantum interferences between virtual multiphoton fluctuations and the mean field in a Poisson superposition of all number states. Here, we demonstrate how one can control the multiphoton dynamics of a two-level system by disrupting these quantum interferences through a precise and independent homodyne control of the mean field. We show that, counterintuitively, quantum fluctuations always play a major qualitative role, even and in fact especially, when their quantitative contribution is vanishing as compared to that of the mean field. Our findings provide new insights into the paradoxical character of quantum mechanics and open pathways for mean-field engineering as a tool for precision multiphoton control.

We introduce a one-way, one-quantum cascade, whereby a single excitation proceeds one-directionwise in a ladder of energy levels. This makes a variation from more famous two-way cascades where the excitation can go up and down following its excitation or relaxation in the ladder. We provide closed-form solutions for two-photon correlation functions between any transitions in such circular cascades. We discuss how the rich correlations that result from what appears to be an extremely simple implementation, are essentially those which have been obtained from complex architectures relying on strongly-correlated, many-body physics or cavity QED effects, and might constitute the liquid phase of the new family of time materials., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. A. Added discussion on time crystals and details on the structure of each peak

We discuss two-photon physics, taking for illustration the particular but topical case of resonance fluorescence. We show that the basic concepts of interferences and correlations provide at the two-photon level an independent and drastically different picture than at the one-photon level, with landscapes of correlations that reveal various processes by spanning over all the possible frequencies at which the system can emit. Such landscapes typically present lines of photon bunching and circles of antibunching. The theoretical edifice to account for these features rests on two pillars: i) a theory of frequency-resolved photon correlations and ii) admixing classical and quantum fields. While experimental efforts have been to date concentrated on correlations between spectral peaks, strong correlations exist between photons emitted away from the peaks, which are accessible only through multiphoton observables. These could be exploited for both fundamental understanding of quantum-optical processes as well as applications by harnessing these unsuspected resources., Comment: Contribution to "Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Royal Society Newton International Fellowship" issue in Philosophical Transactions A, in Editor's template. Synthesis of 15 years of the Corresponding Author's research, with original results

We study spatial correlations of vortices in different quantum states or with Bose or Fermi statistics. This is relevant for both optical vortices and condensed-matter ones such as microcavity polaritons, or any platform that can prepare and image fields in space at the few-particle level. While we focus on this particular case for illustration of the formalism, we already reveal unexpected features of spatial condensation whereby bosons exhibit a bimodal distribution of their distances which places them farther apart than fermions in over 40% of the cases, or on the opposite conceal spatial correlations to behave like coherent states. Such experiments upgrade in the laboratory successful techniques in uncontrolled extreme environments (stars and nuclei)., Comment: Pre-submission version welcoming comments and suggestions

We provide a mechanism to imprint local temporal correlations in photon streams which have the same character as spatial correlations in liquids. Usual single-photon emitters correspond, in this picture, to a (temporal) gas while uncorrelated light is the ideal gas. We argue that good single-photon sources are those that exhibit such temporal liquid features, i.e., with a plateau for their short-time correlations (as opposed to a linear dependence) and oscillations at later times, which is a direct manifestation of photon time-ordering. We obtain general, closed-form analytical expressions for the second-order coherence function of a broad family of "liquid light" which can be arbitrarily correlated, though never completely crystallized., Comment: Pre-submission version welcoming comments, missing references, etc

We discuss two-photon correlations from the side peaks that are formed when a two-level system emitter is driven coherently, with a detuning between the driving source and the emitter (quasi-resonance fluorescence). We do so in the context of the theories of frequency-resolved photon correlations and homodyning, showing that their combination leads to a neat picture compatible with perturbative two-photon scattering that was popular in the early days of quantum electrodynamics. This should help to control, enhance and open new regimes of multiphoton emission. We also propose a way to evidence the quantum coherent nature of the process from photoluminescence only, through the observation of a collapse of the symmetry of the lineshape accompanied by a surge of its intensity of emission. We discuss several of our results in the light of recent experimental works., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures -- added ideal two-photon cascade formula (Eq. 3), additional references, corrected some typos & other minor changes. Submitted to Quantum Sci. Technol

We describe some of the main external mechanisms that lead to a loss of antibunching, i.e., that spoil the character of a given quantum light to deliver its photons separated the ones from the others. Namely, we consider contamination by noise, a time jitter in the photon detection and the effect of frequency filtering (or detection with finite bandwidth). The emission from a two-level system under both incoherent and coherent driving is taken as a particular case of special interest. The coherent case is further separated into its vanishing (Heitler) and high (Mollow) driving regimes. We provide analytical solutions which, in the case of filtering, unveil an unsuspected structure in the transitions from perfect antibunching to thermal (incoherent case) or uncorrelated (coherent case) emission. The experimental observations of these basic and fundamental transitions would provide another compelling evidence of the correctness and importance of the theory of frequency-resolved photon correlations., Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. A

Epitaxial quantum dots have emerged as one of the best single-photon sources, not only for applications in photonic quantum technologies but also for testing fundamental properties of quantum optics. One intriguing observation in this area is the scattering of photons with subnatural linewidth from a two-level system under resonant continuous wave excitation. In particular, an open question is whether these subnatural linewidth photons exhibit simultaneously antibunching as an evidence of single-photon emission. Here, we demonstrate that this simultaneous observation of subnatural linewidth and antibunching is not possible with simple resonant excitation. First, we independently confirm single-photon character and subnatural linewidth by demonstrating antibunching in a Hanbury Brown and Twiss type setup and using high-resolution spectroscopy, respectively. However, when filtering the coherently scattered photons with filter bandwidths on the order of the homogeneous linewidth of the excited state of the two-level system, the antibunching dip vanishes in the correlation measurement. Our experimental work is consistent with recent theoretical findings, that explain antibunching from photon-interferences between the coherent scattering and a weak incoherent signal in a skewed squeezed state., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Photon correlations, as measured by Glauber's $n$-th order coherence functions $g^{(n)}$, are highly sought to be minimized and/or maximized. In systems that are coherently driven, so-called blockades can give rise to strong correlations according to two scenarios based on level-repulsion (conventional blockade) or interferences (unconventional blockade). Here we show how these two approaches relate to the admixing of a coherent state with a quantum state such as a squeezed state for the simplest and most recurrent case. The emission from a variety of systems, such as resonance fluorescence, the Jaynes-Cummings model or microcavity polaritons, as a few examples of a large family of quantum optical sources, are shown to be particular cases of such admixtures, that can further be doctored-up externally by adding an amplitude- and phase-controlled coherent field with the effect of tuning the photon statistics from exactly zero to infinity. We show how such an understanding also allows to classify photon statistics throughout platforms according to conventional and unconventional features, with the effect of optimizing the correlations and with possible spectroscopic applications. In particular, we show how configurations that can realize simultaneously conventional and unconventional antibunching bring the best of both worlds: huge antibunching (unconventional) with large populations and being robust to dephasing (conventional)., Comment: Published version

The elastic scattering peak of a resonantly driven two-level system has been argued to provide narrow-linewidth antibunched photons. Although independent measurements of spectral width on the one hand and antibunching on the other hand do seem to show that this is the case, a joint measurement reveals that only one or the other of these attributes can be realised in the direct emission. We discuss a scheme which interferes the emission with a laser to produce simultaneously single photons of subnatural linewidth. In particular, we consider the effect of dephasing and of the detuning between the driving laser and/or the detector with the emitter. We find that also in presence of dephasing, our scheme brings considerable improvement as compared to the standard scheme., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures

Resonance fluorescence---the light emitted when exciting resonantly a two-level system---is a popular quantum source as it seems to inherit its spectral properties from the driving laser and its statistical properties from the two-level system, thus providing a subnatural-linewidth single-photon source. However, these two qualities do not actually coexist in resonance fluorescence, since an optical target detecting these antibunched photons will either be spectrally broad itself and not benefit from the spectrally narrow source, or match spectrally with the source but in this case the antibunching will be spoiled. We first explain this failure through a decomposition of the field-emission and how this gets affected by frequency resolution. We then show how to restore the sought joint subnatural linewidth and antibunched properties, by interfering the resonance fluorescence output with a coherent beam. We finally discuss how the signal that is eventually generated in this way features a new type of quantum correlations, with a plateau of antibunching which suppresses much more strongly close photon pairs. This introduces a new concept of perfect single-photon source., Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures

We propose a criterion to classify and compare sources of single photons: the $p$-norm of their $k$th-order photon correlations. While ideally one should use the uniform norm with $p\rightarrow\infty$, in practice, the 3-norm already allows a meaningful comparison and shows the serious limitations of the usual criterion based on the second order correlation $g^{(2)}$ only. We apply this new criterion to a large family of popular single photon sources and show that some of them do not, in fact, qualify for this function. The best sources from our selections consist of a cascade of two-level systems, improving on the otherwise standard low-power resonant excitation of a single two-level system., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures