We study the propagation of nanofiber-guided light through an array of atomic cesium, taking into account the transitions between the hyperfine levels
6S1/2F=4 and $6{P}_{3/2}{F}^{\ensuremath{'}}=5$ of the
D2 line. We derive the coupled-mode propagation equation, the input-output equation, the scattering matrix, the transfer matrix, and the reflection and transmission coefficients for the guided field in the linear, quasistationary, weak-excitation regime. We show that, when the initial distribution of populations of atomic ground-state sublevels is independent of the magnetic quantum number, the quasilinear polarizations along the principal axes
x and
y, which are parallel and perpendicular, respectively, to the radial direction of the atomic position, are not coupled to each other in the linear coherent scattering process. When the guided probe field is quasilinearly polarized along the major principal axis
x, forward and backward scattering have different characteristics. We find that, when the array period is far from the Bragg resonance, the backward scattering is weak. Under the Bragg resonance, most of the guided probe light can be reflected back in a broad region of field detunings even though there is an irreversible decay channel into radiation modes. When the atom number is large enough, two different band gaps may be formed, whose properties depend on the polarization of the guided probe field.
We investigate the scattering of an evanescent light field by a single cesium atom outside a nanofiber. We show that the confinement of the field, the presence of the longitudinal field component and the tangential Poynting vector component, the enhancement of spontaneous emission, and the degeneracy of the atomic ground state substantially affect the scattering process. We find that, in the close vicinity of the fiber surface, the transmittance of the field in the stationary regime can be substantially reduced to 48% due to scattering into radiation modes (with the efficiency as high as 44%) and backward guided modes (with the efficiency as high as 8%).
We study the directional dependence of the coupling between a nanofiber-guided light field and a two-level atom with an electric quadrupole transition. We examine the situation where the nanofiber is aligned along the
z axis, the atom lies on the fiber transverse
x axis, the quantization axis for the atomic internal states is the other orthogonal transverse
y axis, the atomic upper and lower levels are the magnetic sublevels ${M}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ and
M of hyperfine-structure levels of an alkali-metal atom, and the field is in a quasilinearly polarized fundamental guided mode
HE11 with the polarization $\ensuremath{\xi}=x$ or
y. We find that the absolute value of the quadrupole Rabi frequency depends on the propagation direction of the light field in the cases of (${M}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{-}M=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1, \ensuremath{\xi}=y$) and (${M}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{-}M=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}2, \ensuremath{\xi}=x$). We show that the directional dependence of the coupling leads to the directional dependence of spontaneous emission into guided modes. We find that the directional dependence of the atom-field coupling in the case of quadrupole transitions is not entirely due to spin-orbit coupling of light: there are some other contributions resulting from the gradient of the spatial phase factor of the field.
We study the propagation of guided light along an array of three-level atoms in the vicinity of an optical nanofiber under the condition of electromagnetically induced transparency. We examine two schemes of atomic levels and field polarizations where the guided probe field is quasilinearly polarized along the major or minor principal axis, which is parallel or perpendicular, respectively, to the radial direction of the atomic position. Our numerical calculations indicate that 200 cesium atoms in a linear array with a length of 100 $\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}$ at a distance of 200 nm from the surface of a nanofiber with a radius of 250 nm can slow down the speed of guided probe light by a factor of about $3.5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{6}$ (the corresponding group delay is about 1.17 $\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s})$. In the neighborhood of the Bragg resonance, a significant fraction of the guided probe light can be reflected back with a negative group delay. The reflectivity and the group delay of the reflected field do not depend on the propagation direction of the probe field. However, when the input guided light is quasilinearly polarized along the major principal axis, the transmittivity and the group delay of the transmitted field substantially depend on the propagation direction of the probe field. Under the Bragg resonance condition, an array of atoms prepared in an appropriate internal state can transmit guided light polarized along the major principal in one specific direction even in the limit of infinitely large atom numbers. The directionality of transmission of guided light through the array of atoms is a consequence of the existence of a longitudinal component of the guided light field as well as the ellipticity of both the field polarization and the atomic dipole vector.
We investigate the radiative coupling between two two-level atoms with arbitrarily polarized dipoles in the vicinity of a nanofiber. We present a systematic derivation for the master equation, the single- and cross-atom decay coefficients, and the dipole-dipole interaction coefficients for the atoms interacting with the vacuum of the field in the guided and radiation modes of the nanofiber. We study numerically the case where the atomic dipoles are circularly polarized. In this case, the rate of emission depends on the propagation direction along the fiber axis and, hence, the radiative interaction between the atoms is chiral. We examine the time evolution of the atoms for different initial states. We calculate the fluxes and mean numbers of photons spontaneously emitted into guided modes in the positive and negative directions of the fiber axis. We show that the chiral radiative coupling modifies the collective emission of the atoms. We observe that the modifications strongly depend on the initial state of the atomic system, the radiative transfer direction, the distance between the atoms, and the distance from the atoms to the fiber surface.
We study the interaction between a single two-level atom and a quantized single-photon probe pulse in a guided mode of a nanofiber. We examine the situation of chiral interaction, where the atom has a dipole rotating in the meridional plane of the nanofiber and the probe pulse is quasilinearly polarized along the radial direction of the atom position in the fiber transverse plane. We show that the atomic excitation probability, the photon transmission flux, and the photon transmission probability depend on the propagation direction of the probe pulse along the fiber axis. In contrast, the reflection flux and the reflection probability do not depend on the propagation direction of the probe pulse. We find that, unlike the atomic excitation probability, the asymmetry parameter for this characteristic does not vary in time and does not depend on the probe pulse shape.