Multicolor nonlinear chiral quantum optics: beyond phase

Abstract

Chiral quantum nonlinearities that arise when light interacts with quantum emitters are known to modulate only the phase but not the amplitude of scattered photons, enabling the creation of non-reciprocal photonic elements, quantum logic gates, and quantum network protocols. In this work, we show that the addition of a second photon beam drastically changes this picture, enabling both phase and amplitude modulation. Surprisingly, coherent photon transfer between the different beams enables a stronger amplitude modulation than standard symmetric interactions. This is most obvious in the coherent, three-photon amplification, which we predict peaks with a 30% efficiency in a chiral geometry, 3x the efficiency of the symmetric configuration. Our results uncover a new regime of chiral quantum optics and provide a route towards more efficient all-optical control at few-photon energies.