Spontaneous emission of an excited atom in a randomly occupied optical lattice

Sergey V. Prants, Leonid E. Kon’kov

Wei Guo

Michael H. Stewart, Ludwig Krinner, Arturo Pazmiño +1 more

R. M. Sandner, Markus Müller, Andrew J. Daley +1 more

Spontaneous emission by an excited fermionic atom can be suppressed due to the Pauli exclusion principle if the relevant final states after the decay are already occupied by identical atoms in the ground state. Here we discuss a setup where a single atom is prepared in the first excited state on a single site of an optical lattice under conditions of very tight trapping. We investigate these phenomena in the context of two experimental realizations: (1) with alkali-metal atoms, where the decay rate of the excited state is large, and (2) with alkaline-earth-metal-like atoms, where the decay rate from metastable states can be tuned in experiments. This phenomenon has potential applications towards reservoir engineering and dissipative many-body state preparation in an optical lattice.

Wei Guo

The problem of recurrent scattering of spontaneous radiation from a randomly occupied optical lattice is discussed herein theoretically. The intensity of the scattered radiation is calculated and averaged over the random distribution of atoms trapped inside the lattice. From the intensity of the scattered radiation, two properties of random lasing are derived. First, the random lasing's strongest oscillation has a wavelength comparable to the lattice constant and, second, its emission spectrum is discontinuous. In the present paper, a quantity, the number of multiple scattering channels based on the long-range regularity possessed by an optical lattice, is defined. This quantity is found to significantly determine the magnitudes of the mean intensity of the scattered radiation and the wave decay constant.

Roberto Passante, Lucia Rizzuto, Giuseppe Calajò