Controlled Photon Fock State Generation Using Arbitrarily Weak Photonic Nonlinearities

A method and system that harnesses extremely weak Kerr-type nonlinearities in a single driven cavity to deterministically generate single photon Fock states, and more general photon-blockaded states are disclosed. The disclosed scheme is effective even for nonlinearities that are much smaller than photonic loss in the cavity. The disclosed scheme generates photon-blockade states that are non-Gaussian, exhibit a sharp cut-off in their photon number distribution, and can be arbitrarily close to, for example, a single-photon Fock state. This scheme relies only standard linear and parametric drives, and are hence compatible with a variety of different photonic platforms.