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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Atom-light interface in strong focusing geometry

Syed Abdullah Aljunid, Jianwei Lee, Hoang Lan Dao, Kadir Durak, Martin Paesold, Brenda Chng, Gleb Maslennikov, Christian Kurtsiefer

Published May 1, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It was recently shown that a single atom located at the focus of a simple aspheric lens can efficiently scatter photons out of a focused coherent light beam [1, 2], impose a phase shift [3], and partially reflect a probe beam [4]. With our current experimental system, we observe an extinction of 10% and a phase shift of about 1° (Fig. 1).

DOI
10.1109/cleoe.2011.5943400

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It was recently shown that a single atom located at the focus of a simple aspheric lens can efficiently scatter photons out of a focused coherent light beam [1, 2], impose a phase shift [3], and partially reflect a probe beam [4]. With our current experimental system, we observe an extinction of 10% and a phase shift of about 1° (Fig. 1).
We consider the near-resonant interaction between a single atom and a focused light mode, where the single atom localized at the focus of a lens can scatter a significant fraction of light. Complementary to previous experiments on extinction and phase shift effects of a single atom, here we report on the measurement of coherently backscattered light. The strength of the observed effect suggests combining strong focusing with a cavity to further enhance the field at the location of the atom. This could make scaling up to a network of several atom + cavity nodes more realistic due to significant technical simplification of the atom–light interface. We consider theoretically a nearly concentric cavity, which has a strongly focused optical mode. Simple estimates show that in such a case one can expect a significant single photon Rabi frequency.
In order to observe substantial interaction between single atoms and photons, cavities with a high finesse can be used to enhance the field at the location of an atom. Alternatively, an attempt can be made to tailor the spatial mode of a photon to closely match the mode corresponding to an electrical dipole transition of an atom by strong focusing [1]. In this paper, we present our experimental work on measurements of extinction and phase shift of a weak coherent beam due to the presence of an atom in the strongly focused part of a Gaussian light beam.
We characterize the interaction between a single atom or similar microscopic system and a light field via the scattering ratio. For this, we first derive the electrical field in a strongly focused Gaussian light beam, and then consider the atomic response. Following the simple scattering model, the fraction of scattered optical power for a weak coherent probe field leads to unphysical scattering ratios above 1 in the strong focusing regime. A refined model considering interference between the exciting and scattered field into finite-sized detectors or optical fibers is presented, and compared with experimental extinction measurements for various focusing strengths.