Pure dephasing destroys two-photon amplitude, not nonlinear phase

arXiv:2610.30098 · quant-ph · Submitted 2026-10-21 · Read on arXiv

quant-ph

Submitted: 2026-10-21

Updated: 2026-10-21

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: A two-level emitter chirally coupled to a waveguide imprints a π conditional phase on a two-photon pulse, a key component assumed in quantum photonic neural network architectures, but whether it

Abstract

A two-level emitter chirally coupled to a waveguide imprints a π conditional phase on a two-photon pulse, a key component assumed in quantum photonic neural network architectures, but whether it survives the pure dephasing of a solid-state emitter is unknown, since no two-photon scattering treatment includes it. We derive the dephased two-photon amplitude in closed form and validate it against an independent Fock-state master equation. The conditional phase is pinned at exactly π at every dephasing rate examined: dephasing destroys the amplitude carrying the nonlinear phase rather than rotating it. The one- and two-photon channels are not attenuated equally, so dephasing does not simply scale the node down but reweights it between photon-number sectors---an error no phase setting can train away. The standard factorization of two-photon correlators, exact for arbitrary loss, fails at first order in γ ϕ, discarding 16 -- 81% of pairs over γ ϕ/γ=0.1 -- 1.

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