The emergence of photonic quantum correlations is typically associated with emitters strongly coupled to a photonic mode. Here, we show that semiconductor Rydberg excitons, which are only weakly coupled to a free-space light mode can produce strongly antibunched fields, i.e. quantum light. This effect is fueled by micron-scale excitation blockade between Rydberg excitons inducing pair-wise polariton scattering events. Photons incident on an exciton resonance are scatted into blue- and red-detuned pairs, which enjoy relative protection from absorption and thus dominate the transmitted light. We demonstrate that this effect persists in the presence of additional phonon coupling, strong non-radiative decay and across a wide range of experimental parameters. Our results pave the way for the observation of quantum statistics from weakly coupled semiconductor excitons.
@article{arxiv.2211.16658,
title = {Quantum light from lossy semiconductor Rydberg excitons},
author = {Valentin Walther and Anders S. Sørensen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.16658},
year = {2023}
}