Antibunching of thermal radiation by a room-temperature phonon bath: A numerically solvable model for a strongly interacting light-matter-reservoir system

Progress in semiconductor technology introduces a new platform for quantum optics studies in solid state: a quantum dot strongly coupled to a cavity mode. We present a numerically solvable model for the combined electron, photon, and phonon dynamics. For a cavity mode prepared in a Fock state, the model reproduces the Jaynes-Cumming solution and interaction with a phonon bath leads to a higher value for the intensity-intensity correlation function: g(2)(0). In contrast, for an initial thermal photon distribution, the phonon-bath interaction gives a counterintuitive reduction in g(2)(0), resulting in the classical photon distribution evolving into a nonclassical one. © 2010 The American Physical Society.