A promising approach to merge atomic systems with scalable photonics has emerged recently, which consists of trapping cold atoms near tapered nanofibers. Here, we describe a novel technique to achieve strong, coherent coupling between a single atom and photon in such a system. Our approach makes use of collective enhancement effects, which allow a lattice of atoms to form a high-finesse cavity within the fiber. We show that a specially designated "impurity" atom within the cavity can experience strongly enhanced interactions with single photons in the fiber. Under realistic conditions, a "strong coupling" regime can be reached, wherein it becomes feasible to observe vacuum Rabi oscillations between the excited impurity atom and a single cavity quantum. This technique can form the basis for a scalable quantum information network using atom-nanofiber systems.
@article{arxiv.1201.0643,
title = {Cavity QED with atomic mirrors},
author = {D. E. Chang and L. Jiang and A. V. Gorshkov and H. J. Kimble},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.0643},
year = {2015}
}