Strong Photon Blockade Mediated by Optical Stark Shift in a Single-Atom–Cavity System

We propose a theoretical scheme to achieve strong photon blockade via a single atom in cavity. By utilizing optical Stark shift, the dressed-state splitting between higher and lower branches is enhanced, which results in significant increasing for lower (higher) branch and decreasing for higher (lower) branch at the negative (positive) Stark shift, and dominates the time-evolution of photon number oscillations as well. Furthermore, the two-photon excitation is suppressed via quantum interference under optimal phase and Rabi frequency of an external microwave field. It is shown that the interplay between the quantum interference and the enhanced vacuum-Rabi splitting gives rise to a strong photon blockade for realizing high-quality single photon source beyond strong atom-cavity coupling regime. In particular, by tuning the optical Stark shift, the second-order correlation function for our scheme has three orders of magnitude smaller than Jaynes-Cummings model and correspondingly there appears a large cavity photon number as well. Our proposal may implicate exciting opportunities for potential applications on quantum network and quantum information processing.