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Frontiers in Optics

Breaking the Mirror Symmetry of Spontaneous Emission Via Spin-orbit Interaction of Light

Arno Rauschenbeutel

Published Jan 1, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Light with strong intensity gradients at the wavelength scale exhibits a significant polarization component along its direction of propagation. The interaction of quantum emitters with such light fields leads to new and surprising effects.
DOI
10.1364/ls.2014.lw4h.4

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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.
Abstract We demonstrate that a nonlinear spin–orbit interaction (SOI) emerges in cold Rydberg atomic gases, where the orbital characteristics (spatial structure) of light fields become coupled to their polarization (spin). This SOI originates from the giant, spatially inhomogeneous nonlinear optical response arising from the strong, long-range interactions between Rydberg atoms. By extending the theoretical framework beyond the conventional paraxial approximation, we derive a light propagation equation that rigorously incorporates such inhomogeneous nonlinearity. Our study reveals that the SOI is driven by the gradient of the inhomogeneous nonlinear response and therefore vanishes in linear or homogeneous media. When two orthogonal light fields co-propagate, the SOI generates novel nonlinear energy transfer and pronounced structural deformation, which are not captured without considering the SOI or within the paraxial approximation. Furthermore, owing to its direct dependence on the gradient of the nonlocal nonlinearity, the SOI is inherently mode-dependent. As a consequence, the structural deformation becomes particularly significant for light fields with odd parity symmetry. Our investigation establishes novel pathways for exploring the nonlinear SOI and examining inhomogeneous nonlinear optical responses beyond the paraxial approximation in cold Rydberg atomic gases.