The manipulation of photon blockade via Newtonian gravity

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the model of a quadratically coupled optomechanical system with a Newtonian gravitational potential in the weak-driving regime, where the optical cavity is driven by an external laser. The steady state of the whole system is treated in the framework of a few-photon subspace. We find that the conventional single-photon blockade, nonstandard types of single-photon blockade, two-photon blockade, and photon-induced tunneling can be induced by gravity when the quadratic optomechanical coupling strength remains constant. Moreover, we find that gravitational potential energy can compensate for the lack of quadratic optomechanical coupling for observation photon blockade. In particular, the photon stream with super-Poissonian distribution can be converted into a sub-Poissonian, antibunching photon stream by changing the driving detuning when the gravitational potential energy is included. These results show that the gravity has potential for realizing the manipulation of photon blockade in a quadratically coupled optomechanical system.