Strong interaction between the light field and an atom is often achieved with cavities. Recent experiments have used a different configuration: a propagating light field is strongly focused using a system of lenses, the atom being supposed to sit at
the focal position. In reality, this last condition holds only up to some approximation; in particular, at any finite temperature, the atom position fluctuates. We present a formalism that describes the focalized field and the atom sitting at an arbitrary position. As a first application, we show that thermal fluctuations do account for the extinction data reported in M. K. Tey et al., Nature Physics 4, 924 (2008).
