Why material slow light does not improve cavity-enhanced atom detection
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 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.01028,
title = {Why material slow light does not improve cavity-enhanced atom detection},
author = {B. Megyeri and A. Lampis and G. Harvie and R. Culver and J. Goldwin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.01028},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
11 pages, 4 figures; QuTiP python file included. This version: changed title and added several references; results are unchanged. Accepted for open access publication in a special issue of Journal of Modern Optics in memory of Prof Danny Segal. Publisher's version available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500340.2017.1384512