Engineering and characterizing nonclassical states of light in quantum optical networks

The exploration of open quantum many-body systems -systems of microscopic size exhibiting quantum coherence and interacting with their surrounding- has emerged as a key research area over the last years. The recent advances in controlling and preserving quantum coherence at the level of a single particle, developed in a wide variety of physical platforms, have been a major driving force in this field. The driven dissipative nature is a common characteristic of a wide class of modern experimental platforms in quantum science and technology, such as photonic systems, ultracold atoms, optomechanical systems, or superconducting circuits. The interplay between the coherent quantum dynamics and dissipation in open quantum systems leads to a wide range of novel out-of-equilibrium behaviours. Among them, the emergence in these systems of dynamical phases with novel broken symmetries, topological phases and the occurrence of dissipative phase transitions are of particular interest. This thesis aims at establishing a theoretical framework to engineer, characterize and control nonclassical states of light in photonic quantum optical networks in different regimes. The emphasis is put on its implementation, in particular with respect to integration and scalability in photonic platforms. In this thesis, we tackle some interesting aspects arising in the study of the dynamics of driven dissipative coupled nonlinear optical resonators. In that context, we consider the dynamics of two coupled nonlinear photonic cavities in the presence of inhomogeneous coherent driving and local dissipations using the Lindblad master equation formalism.We show that this simple open quantum many-body system can be subject to dynamical instabilities. In particular, our analysis shows that this system presents highly nonclassical properties and its dynamics exhibits dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs), characterized by the robustness of its specific temporal or spatial waveform during propagation.In a second step, our intuition gained from this system composed of only few degrees of freedom is expanded to the study of systems of bigger size. In particular, we study DKSs originating from the parametric gain in Kerr microresonators. While DKSs are usually described using a classical mean-field approach, our work proposes a quantum-mechanical model formulated in terms of the truncated Wigner formalism. This analysis is motivated by the fact that technological implementations push towards the realization of DKSs in miniaturized integrated systems. These are operating at low power, a regime where quantum effects are expected to be relevant. Using the tools provided by the theory of open quantum systems, we propose a detailed investigation of the impact of quantum fluctuations on the spectral and dynamical properties of DKSs. We show that the quantum fluctuations arising from losses engender a finite lifetime to the soliton, and demonstrate that DKSs correspond to a specific class of dissipative time crystals.