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Physical Review A

Spontaneous emission in cavity QED with a terminated waveguide

Matthew Bradford, Jung‐Tsung Shen

Published Jun 19, 2013• 36 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the effects of a nanophotonic boundary on the spontaneous emission properties of an excited two-level atom in cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) geometry. We show that a boundary provides temporally delayed interference, which can be either constructive or destructive. Consequently, the decay of the atomic excitation can be either increased or greatly inhibited. As a concrete example, we investigate the spontaneous emission process in cavity QED with a terminated line-defect waveguide, and show the rich behavior of the atomic response due to the boundary. We also show that the output photonic wave form is strongly influenced by the boundary.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.87.063830

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In this work, we consider atomic spontaneous emission in a system consisting of two identical two-level atoms interacting dispersively with the quantized electromagnetic field in a high-Q cavity. We investigate the destructive effect of the atomic decay on the generation of maximally entangled states, following the proposal by Zheng S B and Guo G C (2000 Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 2392). In particular, we analyze the fidelity of teleportation performed using such a noisy channel and calculatethe maximum spontaneous decay rate we may have in order to realize teleportation.
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We analyze the non-Markovian spontaneous-emission dynamics of a two-level test atom placed in a cavity formed by two atomic arrays in a waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED) setup. We demonstrate a crossover from single-mode to multimode strong-coupling cavity QED as the cavity length $\ensuremath{\sim}d$ becomes comparable to the coherence length associated with collective spontaneous emission $\ensuremath{\sim}v/(N\ensuremath{\gamma})$. The resulting non-Markovian dynamics of the test atom and the emergent spectral density of the field are analyzed as a function of various tunable atomic array parameters: the number of atoms, length of the atomic cavity, and resonance frequency of the atoms forming the atomic mirrors. Our results show limitations to cooperatively enhanced light-matter coupling in the presence of time-delayed feedback. We further illustrate that the non-Markovian system dynamics can be efficiently approximated in terms of a few modes of the emergent spectral density of the field.
Non-Markovian dynamics with ΛΛΛ-type atomic systems in a single end photonic waveguide
In this work, we investigate the non-Markovian dynamical evolution of a ΛΛΛ-type atom interacting with a semi-infinite one-dimensional photonic waveguide via two atomic transitions. The waveguide terminates at a perfect mirror, which reflects the light and introduces boundary effects. We derive exact analytical expressions and show that, under suitable conditions, the instantaneous and retarded decay rates reach equilibrium, leading to the formation of an atom-photon bound state that suppresses dissipation. Consequently, the atom retains a long-lived population in the asymptotic time limit. Furthermore, we analyze the output field intensity and demonstrate that blocking one of the coupling channels forces the atomic system to emit photons of a single frequency. Finally, we extend the model to a two-atom system and examine the disentanglement dynamics of the two spatially separated atoms. These findings elucidate the dynamic process of spontaneous emission involving multi-frequency photons from multi-level atoms and provide insights into the complex interference between different decay pathways.