Optical normal-mode-induced phonon-sideband splitting in photon-blockade effect

Abstract: We study the photon-blockade effect in a loop-coupled optomechanical system consisting of two cavity modes and one mechanical mode. Here, the mechanical mode is optomechanically coupled to the two cavity modes, which are coupled with each other via a photon-hopping interaction. By treating the photon-hopping interaction as a perturbation, we obtain the analytical results of the eigenvalues and eigenstates of the system in the subspaces associated with zero, one, and two photons. We find a phenomenon of optical normal-mode-induced phonon-sideband splitting in the photon-blockade effect by analytically and numerically calculating the second-order correlation functions of the two cavity modes. This work not only presents a method to choose optimal driving frequency for photon blockade by tuning the photon-hopping interaction, but also provides a means to characterize the normal-mode splitting with cavity photon statistics.