Photon propagation through linearly active dimers

Abstract: We provide an analytic propagator for non-Hermitian dimers showing linear gain or losses in the quantum regime. In particular, we focus on experimentally feasible realizations of the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric dimer and provide their mean photon number and second order two-point correlation. We study the propagation of vacuum, single photon spatially-separable, and two-photon spatially-entangled states. We show that each configuration produces a particular signature that might signal their possible uses as photon switches, semi-classical intensity-tunable sources, or spatially entangled sources to mention a few possible applications.