Unconventional saturation effects at intermediate drive in a lossy cavity coupled to few emitters*

The loss rates in highly dissipative cavity-emitter systems render the realization of many desirable nonlinear effects, such as saturation and photon blockade, problematic.

Here we present another effect occurring within the Tavis-Cummings model: a nonlinear response of the cavity for resonant external driving of intermediate strength, which makes use of large cavity dissipation rates. In this regime, (N+1)-photon processes dominate when the cavity couples to N emitters. We provide a picture of how the effect occurs due to destructive interference between the emitter ensemble and the external drive. We find that a central condition for the observed effect is large cooperativity, i.e., the product of the cavity and emitter decay rates is much smaller than the collective cavity-emitter interaction strength squared. Importantly, this condition does not require strong coupling. We also find an analytical expression for the critical drive strength at which the effect appears. Our results have potential for quantum state engineering and could be used for the characterization of cavity-emitter systems with unknown emitter number. In particular, our results open the way for investigations of unique quantum-optics applications in a variety of platforms that neither require high-quality cavities nor strong coupling.