Connecting steady-states of driven-dissipative photonic lattices with spontaneous collective emission phenomena

Abstract

Abstract Recent experimental advances enable the fabrication of photonic lattices in which the light propagates with engineered energy dispersions. When interfaced with quantum emitters, such systems yield strong collective spontaneous emission phenomena, such as perfect sub-radiance, in which the decay into the bath is completely suppressed, forming bound-states-in-the-continuum (BIC). Since such photonic lattices are generally lossy, an alternative way of probing them consists in coherently driving them to an steady-state from which photoluminescence can be extracted. Here, we formalize connections between these two seemingly different situations and use that intuition to predict the formation of non-trivial photonic steady-states in one and two dimensions. In particular, we show that subradiant emitter configurations are linked to the emergence of steady-state light-localization in the driven-dissipative setting, in which the light features the same form than the spontaneously formed BIC. Besides, we also find configurations which leads to the opposite behaviour, an anti-localization of light, that is, it distributes over all the system except for the region defined between the driving lasers. These results shed light on the recently reported optically-defined cavities in polaritonic lattices, and can guide further experimental studies.