Interfacing light and single atoms with a lens

Quantifying the role of thermal motion in free-space light-atom interaction

“…The beam profile before L 1 is approximately Gaussian, with a waist w L = 2.7 mm. Following [13,31], the spatial mode overlap Λ of the Gaussian mode focused by an ideal lens with the dipole mode of a stationary atom depends on the focusing strength u := w L /f ,…”

Photon bandwidth dependence of light-matter interaction

“…The interaction between single atoms and light has been studied extensively in semi-classical and fully quantized frameworks [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Interesting recent results were the complete reflection of light by a single atom [20,24] and the complete absorption of a single photon by reversing the spontaneous emission process from an excited * christian.kurtsiefer@gmail.com two-level atom into spherical harmonic modes described many decades ago [19,23,25,28].…”

“…Interesting recent results were the complete reflection of light by a single atom [20,24] and the complete absorption of a single photon by reversing the spontaneous emission process from an excited * christian.kurtsiefer@gmail.com two-level atom into spherical harmonic modes described many decades ago [19,23,25,28].…”

Interaction of light with a single atom in the strong focusing regime

“…The concave surfaces form the cavity, which is almost concentric -and thus possibly difficult to align. We like to point out that for using our derivation of the focused light fields [19], such cavity modes require that the mirror surfaces be strictly spherical with a curvature radius r c , and L < ∼ 2r c . We approximated the focal position for the focused mode as coinciding with the center of the wave front for the focusing calculations, but this does not imply that such a cavity would be concentric.…”