Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Spontaneous emission of a two-level atom in one dimensional LHM-RHM photonic crystals (Invited Paper)

Shi-Yao Zhu, Nian-hua Liu, Jing Xu

Published May 23, 2005• 0 citations

Abstract

We investigate the spontaneous emission of a two-level atom in one dimensional photonic crystals composed of left-hand material (LHM) and right-hand material (RHM). A complete set of mode functions is constructed for the quantization of the radiation field. It is found that the mode functions for the frequency with in the band gap decreases exponentially from the surface to the interior of the photonic crystal which results in a much weaker field than the vacuum in the free space. The depression of the field leads to weak interaction with the atom, which leads to the suppressed spontaneous emission. Due to the strong reflection, the field in the LHM-RHM structure is much weaker than that in the RHM-RHM structure, thus the spontaneous emission is more strongly suppressed.

DOI: 10.1117/12.609353

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