Configuration-dependent reflection induced by dissipated localized modes

¹ Institute of Physics, Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, China
² Department of Physics, Renmin University of China - Beijing 100190, China
³ Beijing Key Laboratory of Opto-electronic Functional Materials & Micro-nano Devices ( Renmin University of China )
⁴ School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - Beijing 100190, China

^(a) zhoudl72@aphy.iphy.ac.cn

Received: 22 November 2016
Accepted: 5 April 2017

Abstract

We study the one-photon scattering problem for a super-cavity (SC) coupling with two two-level atoms. With atomic decay, photon reflection shows a sudden drop at only for the two atoms in the node-antinode configuration. The underlying mechanism is attributed to the fact that the scatterer has a configuration-dependent localized dissipated eigen-mode at . In the node-antinode configuration, the eigen-mode localized at the input side, through which the photon can enter into the SC, then excites the atom at the node and finally leaks into the reservoir due to atomic decay. In this way, a sudden drop emerges at in photon reflection. In the antinode-node case, however, the eigen-mode is localized at the output side, so the photon is completely reflected at . A similar phenomenon has been observed in a recent experiment of X-ray quantum optics (Röhlsberger R. et al., Nature, 482 (2012) 199) but with a complicated explanation due to electromagnetically induced transparency.