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arXiv:1301.1659 · Physical Review Letters

Strong Coupling between Single Atoms and Nontransversal Photons

Christian Junge, Danny G. O’Shea, Jürgen Volz, Arno Rauschenbeutel

Published May 22, 2013• 306 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Light is often described as a fully transverse-polarized wave, i.e., with an electric field vector that is orthogonal to the direction of propagation. However, light confined in dielectric structures such as optical waveguides or whispering-gallery-mode microresonators can have a strong longitudinal polarization component. Here, using single (85)Rb atoms strongly coupled to a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator, we experimentally and theoretically demonstrate that the presence of this longitudinal polarization fundamentally alters the interaction between light and matter.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.110.213604

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Light is often described as a fully transverse-polarized wave, i.e., with an electric field vector that is orthogonal to the direction of propagation. However, light confined in dielectric structures such as optical waveguides or whispering-gallery-mode microresonators can have a strong longitudinal polarization component. Here, using single (85)Rb atoms strongly coupled to a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator, we experimentally and theoretically demonstrate that the presence of this longitudinal polarization fundamentally alters the interaction between light and matter.
The interaction between single quantum emitters and non-transversally polarized photons for which the electric field vector amplitude has a significant component in the direction of propagation is investigated. Even though this situation seems to be at odds with the description of light as a transverse wave, it regularly occurs when interfacing or manipulating emitters with non-paraxial, guided, or evanescent light. Here, this phenomenon for the case of single atoms that strongly interact with whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microresonators is quantitatively investigated. These resonators confine light by continuous total internal reflection and offer the advantage of very long photon lifetimes in conjunction with near-lossless in- and out-coupling of light via tapered fiber couplers. In the setup, a novel type of high-Q WGM microresonator - a so-called bottle microresonator, which has the additional advantage of being fully tunable and provides a mode geometry that enables near-lossless simultaneous coupling of two independent tapered fiber couplers, is employed.
We demonstrate trapping of a single ^{85}Rb atom at a distance of about 200 nm from the surface of a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator. The atom is trapped in an optical potential, which is created by retroreflecting a red-detuned focused laser beam from the resonator surface. We counteract the trap-induced light shift of the atomic transition frequency by superposing a second laser beam. This allows us to observe a vacuum Rabi splitting in the excitation spectrum of the coupled atom-resonator system. This first demonstration of stable and controlled interaction of a single atom with a whispering-gallery mode in the strong coupling regime opens up the route toward the implementation of quantum protocols and applications that harvest the chiral atom-light coupling present in this class of resonators.
Interfacing cold atoms with nanophotonic waveguides and resonators promises stronger atom-light interactions and leads to new paradigms for quantum optics. Here, we demonstrate coupling single atoms to a nanophotonic whispering-gallery-mode resonator using two different methods. The first one is an optical guiding technique that makes use of diffracted light from a nanophotonic waveguide to direct cold atoms to the evanescent region of the resonator. The second one is an optical conveyor-belt consisting of a moving optical lattice for controlled delivery of trapped atoms. Our demonstration enables new applications with scalable light-matter interface based on cold atoms coupled to nanophotonic circuits.
We theoretically show that achieving high Q-factors of small whispering gallery mode resonators, together with significant non-harmonism (non-equidistance) of its modes, allows for extensive analogy between properties of atoms and the resonator modes. The non-harmonism in very high-Q microresonators is caused by the material as well as geometrical dispersion. The established analogy leads to creating of a photonic media with properties similar to those of atomic media. For instance, effective two-level systems can be formed within the resonator. The levels of the systems, i.e. the resonator modes, can be coupled with microwave or optical fields. Strong confinement of the light in the resonator along with high Q-factors results in nonlinear processes at low light levels even with small nonlinearities typical of optically transparent materials.
Summary form only given. Controlling the interaction of light and matter is the basis for diverse applications ranging from light technology to quantum information processing. Nowadays, many of these applications are based on nanophotonic structures. It turns out that the confinement of light in such nanostructures imposes an inherent link between its local polarization and its propagation direction, also referred to as spin-momentum locking of light [1]. Remarkably, this leads to chiral, i.e., propagation direction-dependent effects in the emission and absorption of light, and elementary processes of light-matter interaction are fundamentally altered. For example, when coupling plasmonic particles or atoms to evanescent fields, the intrinsic mirror symmetry of the particles' emission can be broken. In our group, we observed this effect in the interaction between single rubidium atoms and the evanescent part of a light field that is confined by continuous total internal reflection in a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator [2]. In the following, this allowed us to realize chiral nanophotonic interfaces in which the emission direction of light into the structure is controlled by the polarization of the excitation light [3] or by the internal quantum state of the emitter [4], respectively. Moreover, we employed this chiral interaction to demonstrate an integrated optical isolator [5] as well as an integrated optical circulator [6] which operate at the single-photon level and which exhibit low loss. The latter are the first two examples of a new class of nonreciprocal nanophotonic devices which exploit the chiral interaction between single quantum emitters and transversally confined photons.