Interaction between atoms and metamaterials: Purcell effect and effective medium theories

Abstract

This proposal aims to investigate analytically and numerically the interaction betweenatoms and evanescent waves in the vicinity of hyperbolic metamaterials and nanoparticles.Such metamaterials combine properties of photonic crystals and eective media,exhibiting hyperbolic dispersion relations, and are built by epitaxial growth of plasmonicand dielectric layer structures. As the spontaneous emission rate of radiation associatedwith atoms and molecules is inuenced by the environment, via the so-called Purcelleect, plasmonic nanostructures have been theoretically applied to realize experimentalschemes to tailor the spontaneous emission rate in the visible spectrum range, amplifyingor suppressing the corresponding radiative eciency of the atom. From the experimentalpoint of view, only recently it has been possible to control eciently the uorescence ofultracold atoms by coupling them with surface plasmons on a metal surface, providingnew routes of applications to be realized with nanostructured metamaterials. Theadvantage of employing metamaterials and nanoparticles arrays lies in the tunabilityof surface plasmon mode excitations, which dominate in a large extent the atomicnon-radiative decay process in the near-eld. This allows us to explore, via plasmonicexcitations and Fano resonances in nanostructures, eects of the interaction betweensingle atoms and a plasmonic tunable environment to investigate the possibility ofrealizing quantum sensors with high sensitivity. (AU)