Abstract

A tremendous effort has been invested in studying cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) that describes the interaction between a single emitter and a single quantum of light - a photon or in the fundamental limit the quantum mechanical vacuum field. In the standard Markovian picture of spontaneous emission an excited emitter is coupled to a broadband continuum of vacuum modes. The emitter relaxes back to the ground state while spontaneously emitting a single photon with a constant rate. The static rate of spontaneous emission has been successfully modified by embedding the emitter in Nanophotonic structures that modify the local density of optical states (LDOS). Optical cavities provide a versatile structure for strongly enhancing the LDOS in a narrow bandwidth. For sufficiently strong coupling between the emitter and the cavity mode, the spontaneous emission dynamic becomes non-Markovian where the evolution depends on the past, resulting in Rabi-oscillations for the emitter population. The frequency splitting allows for ultrafast switching on the single photon level [1].

© 2015 IEEE