We show that exciton-type transport in certain materials can be dramatically modified by their inclusion in an optical cavity: the modification of the electromagnetic vacuum mode structure introduced by the cavity leads to transport via delocalized p
olariton modes rather than through tunneling processes in the material itself. This can help overcome exponential suppression of transmission properties as a function of the system size in the case of disorder and other imperfections. We exemplify massive improvement of transmission for excitonic wave-packets through a cavity, as well as enhancement of steady-state exciton currents under incoherent pumping. These results may have implications for experiments of exciton transport in disordered organic materials. We propose that the basic phenomena can be observed in quantum simulators made of Rydberg atoms, cold molecules in optical lattices, as well as in experiments with trapped ions.
We investigate the optomechanical photon-phonon coupling of a single light mode propagating through an array of vibrating mechanical elements. As recently shown for the particular case of a periodic array of membranes embedded in a high-finesse optic
al cavity [A. Xuereb, C. Genes and A. Dantan, Phys. Rev. Lett., textbf{109}, 223601, (2012)], the intracavity linear optomechanical coupling can be considerably enhanced over the single element value in the so-called textit{transmissive regime}, where for motionless membranes the whole system is transparent to light. Here, we extend these investigations to quasi-periodic arrays in the presence of engineered spatial defects in the membrane positions. In particular we show that the localization of light modes induced by the defect combined with the access of the transmissive regime window can lead to additional enhancement of the strength of both linear and quadratic optomechanical couplings.
Ramsey interferometry is routinely used in quantum metrology for the most sensitive measurements of optical clock frequencies. Spontaneous decay to the electromagnetic vacuum ultimately limits the interrogation time and thus sets a lower bound to the
optimal frequency sensitivity. In dense ensembles of two-level systems the presence of collective effects such as superradiance and dipole-dipole interaction tends to decrease the sensitivity even further. We show that by a redesign of the Ramsey-pulse sequence to include different rotations of individual spins that effectively fold the collective state onto a state close to the center of the Bloch sphere, partial protection from collective decoherence and dephasing is possible. This allows a significant improvement in the sensitivity limit of a clock transition detection scheme over the conventional Ramsey method for interacting systems and even for non-interacting decaying atoms.
We investigate a hybrid optomechanical system comprised of a mechanical oscillator and an atomic 3-level ensemble within an optical cavity. We show that a suitably tailored cavity field response via Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT) in t
he atomic medium allows for strong coupling of the mechanical mirror oscillations to the collective atomic ground-state spin. This facilitates ground-state cooling of the mirror motion, quantum state mapping and robust atom-mirror entanglement even for cavity widths larger than the mechanical oscillator frequency.
