Collective Enhancement of Photon Blockade via Two-Photon Interactions

Photon blockade—the suppression of multiphoton transmission by quantum nonlinearities—enables on-demand nonclassical light, but it typically requires strong single-emitter coupling and does not improve by simply adding more emitters. We show that this limitation can be overcome when an ensemble of N identical two-level emitters couples to a single cavity mode through a two-photon exchange interaction. Using input-output theory together with a hierarchy of open-system descriptions (exact numerics, a Holstein-Primakoff model, and an approximated analytical treatment), we characterize the steady-state transmission and photon statistics of the two-photon Tavis-Cummings model. We find that blockade is collectively enhanced: the optimal antibunching improves with atom number (1/N2 scaling of the second-order correlation function) while maintaining near-unit transmission, eliminating the usual brightness-purity trade-off of interference-based weak-coupling schemes. We further identify driving configurations that yield collectively enhanced two-photon blockade, with strong suppression of higher-order autocorrelation functions that deepens with increasing N. The nonclassicality is ultimately limited by decoherence, with emitter dephasing providing the dominant constraint. These results establish collective two-photon light-matter coupling as a scalable route to photon blockade in platforms where individual strong coupling is not achievable.