Photon-pair blockade in a Josephson-photonics circuit with two nondegenerate microwave resonators

Abstract: We propose to generate photon-pair blockade in a Josephson-photonics circuit that consists of a dc voltage-biased Josephson junction in series with a superconducting charge qubit and two nondegenerate microwave resonators. The two-level charge qubit is utilized to create anticorrelations of the charge transport; that is, the simultaneous Cooper pair tunneling events are inhibited. When the Josephson frequency matches the sum of resonance frequencies of the charge qubit and the two resonators, we demonstrate that the two resonators can release their energies in the form of antibunched pairs of two strongly correlated photons. The present work provides a practical way for producing a bright microwave source of antibunched photon pairs, with potential applications ranging from spectroscopy and metrology to quantum information processing.