Strong coupling and high contrast all optical modulation in atomic cladding waveguides

Abstract

In recent years we are witnessing a flourish in research aimed to facilitate alkali vapors in guided wave configurations. Owing to the significant reduction in device dimensions, the increase in density of states, the interaction with surfaces and primarily the high intensities carried along the structure, a rich world of light vapor interactions can be studied, and new functionalities, e.g. low power nonlinear light-matter interactions can be achieved. One immense remaining challenge is to study the effects of quantum coherence and shifts in such nano-scale waveguides, characterized by ultra-small mode areas and fast dynamics. Here, we construct a serpentine silicon-nitride wave guide, having atomic vapor as its cladding. The unprecedented mode volume of 5e-13 m^3 supported over a length of 17 mm is used to demonstrate efficient linear and non-linear spectroscopy. Fascinating and important phenomena such as van der Waals shifts, dynamical stark shifts, and coherent effects such as strong coupling (in the form of Autler Townes splitting) are all observed. The serpentine atomic cladding is a promising building block for a variety of light vapor experiments, as it offers a very small footprint, enables operation with relatively low density of atoms and extremely strong confinement of light and vapor. As such it may be used for important applications, such as all optical switching, frequency referencing, and magnetometry to name a few.

References in corpus (6)

• Low-Light-Level Optical Interactions with Rubidium Vapor in a Photonic Bandgap Fiber
• Evanescent light-matter Interactions in Atomic Cladding Wave Guides
• Rydberg atoms in hollow-core photonic crystal fibres
• Observation of two-photon absorption at low power levels using tapered optical fibers in rubidium vapor
• Optical response of gas-phase atoms at less than $\lambda /80$ from a dielectric surface
• Low-Loss All-Optical Zeno Switch in a Microdisk Cavity Using EIT

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• Invited Review: Micro-fabricated components for cold atom sensors
• Coupling single atoms to a nanophotonic whispering-gallery-mode resonator via optical guiding
• Creating locally interacting Hamiltonians in the synthetic frequency dimension for photons
• Time-domain grating with a periodically driven qutrit
• Laser-written vapor cells for chip-scale atomic sensing and spectroscopy
• Chiral light-matter interactions in hot vapor cladded waveguides
• Arbitrary synthetic dimensions via multi-boson dynamics on a one-dimensional lattice
• Strong interactions between integrated microresonators and alkali atomic vapors: towards single-atom, single-photon operation
• Integrating two-photon nonlinear spectroscopy of rubidium atoms with silicon photonics
• Plasmono-Atomic Interactions on a Fiber Tip
• All-optical pulse switching with a periodically driven dissipative quantum system