Strongly Correlated Photons in a Two-Dimensional Array of Photonic Crystal Microcavities
Abstract
We propose and investigate a practical scheme to observe the photonic quantum phase transition (QPT) from superfluid to Mott-insulator states. The photon hopping energy is controlled by the optical evanescent field coupling between two adjacent photonic crystal microcavities, while the photon-photon interaction energy is provided by the strong coupling between many atoms and single mode cavity. We show that our scheme can be implemented using a two-dimensional array of semiconductor photonic crystal microcavities doped with substitutional donor or acceptor impurities. Such a system is robust against the fluctuation of the number of impurities from one site to another, and requires only a moderate cavity Q factor when choosing an appropriate cavity photon-bound exciton frequency detuning. We also show that in the large detuning limit, our system acts as coupled cavities with optical Kerr nonlinearity where the conventional Bose-Hubbard model is recovered.Keywords
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