Frozen photons in Jaynes-Cummings arrays

Abstract

We study the origin of 'frozen' photonic states in coupled Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard arrays. For the case of half the array initially populated with photons while the other half is left empty, we show the emergence of a self-localized photon or 'frozen' states for specific values of the local atom-photon coupling. We analyse the dynamics in the quantum regime and discover important additional features that do not appear to be captured by a semi-classical treatment, which we analyse for different array sizes and filling fractions. We trace the origin of this interaction-induced photon 'freezing' to the suppression of the excitation of propagating modes in the system at large interaction strengths. We discuss in detail the possibility of experimentally probing the relevant transition by analysing the emitted photon correlations both in the idealized lossless case and more realistic scenarios when reasonable losses are included. We find a strong signature of the effect in the emitted photons statistics. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.