Atom/light interaction at the interface of metamaterials

Abstract

An exciting frontier in the research field of atomic physics is the active engineering of the atomic environment, motivated by the prospect of applications in quantum information science, many-body physics simulation, atom-based metrology and sensor technology. To this end, one active direction in the atomic community is the manipulation of atoms at nanoscale distance from surface plasmons, utilizing the strong confinement of electric field of the surface plasmon to realize atom-trapping, single photon emitter source and strongly coupled system. Towards these goals, we experimentally investigated the coupling of hot atomic Cesium vapor with plasmonic metamaterials. First, we demonstrate tailoring of metamaterial for the tuning of atom-surface Casimir Polder interaction. Next, we realize atom-metamaterial interaction on a fiberized platform. In the atomic spectroscopy realm, we devise a method to study low-lying dipole-forbidden electric quadrupole transition with a non-linear pump-probe technique. Finally, we investigate the possible enhancement of an electric quadrupole transition in the vicinity of a plasmonic metamaterial. Overall, these advances are significant contributions towards achieving subwavelength trapping of atoms at close distance from surface, integrating of fiberized atomic systems for mainstream applications, enabling the studies of the transfer of orbital angular momentum of light to dipole-forbidden transitions and setting forth the investigation direction for dipole-forbidden transitions in an atom-plasmonic system.