Preferences, power, and the determination of working hours

Preferences, power, and the determination of working hour

Why material slow light does not improve cavity-enhanced atom detection

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.Comment: 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/10.1080/09500340.2017.138451

Directional bistability and nonreciprocal lasing with cold atoms in a ring cavity

We demonstrate lasing into counter-propagating modes of a ring cavity using a gas of cold atoms as a gain medium. The laser operates under the usual conditions of magneto-optical trapping with no additional fields. We characterize the threshold behavior of the laser and measure the second-order optical coherence. The laser emission exhibits directional bistability, switching randomly between clockwise and counter-clockwise modes, and a tuneable nonreciprocity is observed as the atoms are displaced along the cavity axis.Comment: Authors' version, with supplemental material included. Published in PRL at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.16360