Spontaneous emission of an atom in a dynamical photonic crystal

Abstract

A structured environment such as a photonic crystal can strongly affect radiative properties of an atomic system, for example the spontaneous emission process. Recently there has been also an increasing interest on dynamical photonic crystal, that is photonic crystals whose dielectric properties change on time. We consider the spontaneous emission of an atom placed inside a photonic crystal with time-dependent properties (dynamical photonic crystal). We investigate the atomic spontaneous emission in two different regimes, weak and strong coupling, assuming a small, periodic and adiabatic perturbation of the crystal. In the weak coupling case, we analytically obtain the spontaneous emission probability of the atom and find a modification of the emission spectrum, where two side peaks appear. In the strong coupling case, we resort to numerical methods and find possibility of enhancement or suppression of the oscillations in the persistence probability with respect to the static case, related to modifications of the backscattering of the emitted photon. P. Lambropoulos, G. M. Nikolopoulos, T. R. Nielsen and S. Bay, Rep. Prog. Phys. 63, 455 (2000), and references therein. S. Fan, Physica B 394, 221 (2007). M. Notomi, Rep. Prog. Phys. 73, 096501 (2010).