Coherent Effects in Spontaneous Emission by Unlike Atoms

Sihua Yuan, J.-Y. Gao

Emmanuel Paspalakis, Shangqing Gong, P. L. Knight

Vyacheslav I. Yukalov

Mostafa Sahrai

The entanglement between a ?-type three-level atom and its spontaneous emission fields is investigated. The effect of spontaneously generated coherence (SGC) on entanglement between the atom and its spontaneous emission fields is then discussed. We find that in the presence of SGC the entanglement between the atom and its spontaneous emission fields is completely phase dependent, while in absence of this coherence the phase dependence of the entanglement disappears. Moreover, the degree of entanglement dramatically changes by the coherent superposition of the atomic states.

Leonid A. Shelepin

Mesfin Woldeyohannes, Sajeev John

We demonstrate the coherent control of spontaneous emission for a three-level atom located within a photonic band-gap structure with one resonant frequency near the edge of the photonic band gap. Spontaneous emission from the three-level atom can be totally suppressed or strongly enhanced depending on the relative phase between the steady-state control laser coupling the two upper levels and the pump laser pulse used to create an excited state of the atom in the form of a coherent superposition of the two upper levels. Unlike the free-space case, the steady-state inversion of the atomic system is strongly dependent on the externally prescribed initial conditions. This nonzero steady-state population is achieved by virtue of the localization of light in the vicinity of the emitting atom. It is robust to decoherence effects provided that the Rabi frequency of the control laser field-atom interaction exceeds the rate of dephasing interactions. As a result, such a system may be relevant for a single-atom, phase-sensitive, optical memory device on the atomic scale. The protected electric dipole within the photonic band gap provides a basis for a qubit to encode information for quantum computations.