Strongly Correlated Photon Transport In Nonlinear Photonic Lattices With Disorder: Probing Signatures Of The Localization Transition

We study the transport of few-photon states in open disordered nonlinear photonic lattices. More specifically, we consider a waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED) setup where photons are scattered from a chain of nonlinear resonators with on-site Bose-Hubbard interaction in the presence of an incommensurate potential. Applying our recently developed diagrammatic technique that evaluates the scattering matrix (S matrix) via absorption and emission diagrams, we compute the two-photon transmission probability and show that it carries signatures of the underlying localization transition of the system. We compare the calculated probability to the participation ratio of the eigenstates and find close agreement for a range of interaction strengths. The scaling of the two-photon transmission probability suggests that there might be two localization transitions in the high energy eigenstates corresponding to interaction and quasiperiodicity respectively. This observation is absent from the participation ratio. We analyze the robustness of the transmission signatures against local dissipation and briefly discuss possible implementation using current technology.