Physical Review A 80, 053826 (2009)

SCI

Cavity-enhanced channeling of emission from an atom into a nanofiber

Fam Le Kien and K. Hakuta

We study spontaneous emission of an atom near a nanofiber with two fiber-Bragg-grating _FBG_ mirrors. We show that the coupling between the atom and the guided modes of the nanofiber can be significantly enhanced by the FBG cavity even when the cavity finesse is moderate. We find that, when the fiber radius is 200 nm and the cavity finesse is about 30, up to 94% of spontaneous emission from the atom can be channeled into the guided modes in the overdamped-cavity regime. We show numerically and analytically that vacuum Rabi oscillations and strong coupling can occur in the FBG cavity even when the cavity finesse is moderate _about 30_ and the cavity length is large _on the order of 10 cm to 1 m_, unlike the case of planar and curved Fabry-Perot cavities.