English

Chirality-enabled optical dipole potential energy for two-level atoms

Optics 2021-01-20 v1 Atomic Physics

Abstract

We consider the optical dipole potential energy, which arises from the interaction of a two-level atom with a circularly polarized Laguerre-Gaussian laser beam of small waist. The beam is characterized by the existence of a longitudinal electric field component which is responsible for the appearance of a chiral term in the optical dipole potential energy. This term reverses sign if either the winding number or the wave polarization of the beam reverses sign. We propose a scheme of a bi-chromatic vortex interaction with the two-level atom in which the resulting optical dipole potential is fully chiral.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.09465,
  title  = {Chirality-enabled optical dipole potential energy for two-level atoms},
  author = {Vassilis. E. Lembessis and Koray Koksal and Jun Yuan and Mohamed Babiker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.09465},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:02:31.725Z