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Material slow light does not improve cavity-enhanced metrologies

Balázs Megyeri, Andreas Lampis, Graeme Harvie, Robert Culver, J. Goldwin

Published May 2, 2017• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We discuss the prospects for enhancing absorption and scattering of light from a weakly coupled atom in a high-finesse optical cavity by adding a medium with large, positive group index of refraction. The slow-light effect is known to narrow the cavity transmission spectrum and increase the photon lifetime, but the quality factor of the cavity is not increased in a metrologically useful sense. Specifically, detection of the weakly coupled atom through either cavity ringdown measurements or the Purcell effect fails to improve with the addition of material slow light. A single-atom model of the dispersive medium helps elucidate why this is the case.

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We discuss the prospects for enhancing absorption and scattering of light from a weakly coupled atom in a high-finesse optical cavity by adding a medium with large, positive group index of refraction. The slow-light effect is known to narrow the cavity transmission spectrum and increase the photon lifetime, but the quality factor of the cavity is not increased in a metrologically useful sense. Specifically, detection of the weakly coupled atom through either cavity ringdown measurements or the Purcell effect fails to improve with the addition of material slow light. A single-atom model of the dispersive medium helps elucidate why this is the case.
We discuss the prospects for enhancing absorption and scattering of light from a weakly coupled atom in a high-finesse optical cavity by adding a medium with large, positive group index of refraction. The slow-light effect is known to narrow the cavity transmission spectrum and increase the photon lifetime, but the quality factor of the cavity may not be increased in a metrologically useful sense. Specifically, detection of the weakly coupled atom through either cavity ringdown measurements or the Purcell effect fails to improve with the addition of material slow light. A single-atom model of the dispersive medium helps elucidate why this is the case.
Summary form only given. Optical microcavities with high quality factors Q are of great interest in integrated micro- and nanophotonics. Their narrow resonance and long photon lifetime (τcav) can be used in fundamental physics, sensing applications, microwave signal optical processing or for optical delay line and memory miniaturization [1]. Considering a Lorentzian resonance profile, the quality factor and the photon lifetime of a microcavity with a resonant angular frequency ωο = 2·πε/λ0reads: Q = ω0τcab= nG(ω0)LF/λ0, (1) where ngis the group index of the material constituting the microcavity, F is the finesse and L is the cavity round-trip length. The usual method to obtain ultra-high quality factors consists in optimizing the manufacturing process to reach high finesse values. Following this approach record quality factors up to 1011have been measured in millimetric CaF2 whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonators [2]. Otherwise, Eq. (1) shows that for a given finesse, the use of resonators made with slow-light materials displaying high group indices can also increase the quality factor. This method has already been successfully implemented in bulky resonators including a highly dispersive slow-light medium [3]. We have recently demonstrated that this approach can be applied to solid-state optical micro-resonators [4]. The slow-light effect was introduced thanks to population oscillations in an Er3+doped WGM fluoride glass microsphere (diameter 100 μm). Since the lifetime of the4I13/2level is very long (T ≈ 10 ms) strong group index up to 106can be obtained. Using a cavity-ring-down method (see Fig. 1) in a pump probe configuration, we have measured a photon lifetime of 2.5 ms at 1530 nm corresponding to a quality factor of 3 × 1012[4].
We have measured mode pushing by the dispersion of a rubidium vapor in a Fabry-Perot cavity and have shown that the scale factor and sensitivity of a passive cavity can be strongly enhanced by the presence of such an anomalous dispersion medium. The enhancement is the result of the atom-cavity coupling, which provides a positive feedback to the cavity response. The cavity sensitivity can also be controlled and tuned through a pole by a second, optical pumping, beam applied transverse to the cavity. Alternatively, the sensitivity can be controlled by the introduction of a second counter-propagating input beam that interferes with the first beam, coherently increasing the cavity absorptance. We show that the pole in the sensitivity occurs when the sum of the effective group index and an additional cavity delay factor that accounts for mode reshaping goes to zero, and is an example of an exceptional point, commonly associated with coupled non- Hermitian Hamiltonian systems. Additionally we show that a normal dispersion feature can decrease the cavity scale factor and can be generated through velocity selective optical pumping.
When a coherently prepared atomic medium is confined in an optical cavity, the atomic coherence and interference manifested by electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) can be manipulated and enhanced by the collective atom–cavity coupling and the cavity feedback. We present an experimental study of the light transmission through an optical cavity coupled with coherently prepared cold Rb atoms. In the frequency domain, the cavity transmission spectrum exhibits spectral peaks representing the cavity normal modes associated with the multi-atom vacuum Rabi splitting and the intra-cavity dark state manifested by the combined EIT effects of the absorption suppression and the steep normal dispersion. In the time domain, a light pulse coupled into the cavity mode propagates with a slow group velocity and the propagation time delay is significantly increased by the cavity feedback.