Coherent Perfect Absorption in Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics

Coherent Perfect Absorption (CPA) is a phenomenon in which the light incident on a lossy medium is completely absorbed by destructive interference among all scattering amplitudes. First introduced by Douglas Stone group at Yale in 2010 as an anti-laser [1], it was demonstrated with ~99.4% absorption in 2011 [2]. It has found applications in photodetection, solar cells, quantum information storage, etc. [3]. In this work, we discuss how the CPA can be realized in cavity quantum electrodynamics. Our system consists of two laser beams shined on the mirrors of a bidirectional single-mode optical cavity with two-level atoms trapped inside. We derive the quantum Langevin equations and analyze the steady-state solutions to find the conditions to accomplish CPA. As an extension of this work, we consider two interacting two-level atoms trapped inside the same type of optical cavity. We particularly focus on how interatomic interactions can impact the CPA under the weak-excitation limit.
[1] Y. D. Chong, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett,.105, 053901 (2010).
[2] W. Wan, et al., Science 331, 889–892 (2011).
[3] D. G. Baranov, et al., Nature Reviews Materials, 2(12), 1–14, (2017).