Elastic photon-atom scattering: Fundamentals and applications - Foreword

Jonathan Carney

Masud Mansuripur

The fundamental processes of absorption, stimulated and spontaneous emission, and elastic as well as inelastic scattering involving light and atoms, molecules, and nano-particles have been studied for decades using both classical and quantum theories. While providing an overview of the subject, this paper presents a streamlined approach to studying atom-photon interactions in the context of modern quantum optics in the hope of providing guidance for applications in the general area of molecular and nano-photonic machines.

Anonymous

Frank A. Narducci, Samir Bali, L. Mandeļ

It has been predicted that when fluorescent photons emitted from an atom in the process of resonance fluorescence interfere with a portion of the coherent driving field, the visibility of the resulting interference exhibits nonclassical features and is zero at the moment when the atom is fully excited and when the fluorescent intensity is greatest.1 We show theoretically that a similar conclusion applies to interference between the fluorescent photons and the elastically scattered part of the driving field, which can be separated out with narrow band filters in practice. This involves the calculation of certain fourth order, three-time correlation functions that have not previously been studied. A possible application of the theory to an interference experiment will be discussed.

J. W. Watson

Thomas Juffmann, Stefan Nimmrichter, Francisco Balzarotti +1 more

The precise localization of particles yields structural and dynamical information in applications ranging from fundamental physics to molecular biology. Here, we discuss how the concept of (Quantum) Fisher information can guide the development of localization techniques. Starting from dipole scattering, we discuss imaging based on elastic and inelastic (e.g. fluorescence) scattering and present experimental designs that increase the information obtained per detected photon.