Search results for "coupled cavities"

Resonant atom-field interaction in large-size coupled-cavity arrays

2011

We consider an array of coupled cavities with staggered inter-cavity couplings, where each cavity mode interacts with an atom. In contrast to large-size arrays with uniform-hopping rates where the atomic dynamics is known to be frozen in the strong-hopping regime, we show that resonant atom-field dynamics with significant energy exchange can occur in the case of staggered hopping rates even in the thermodynamic limit. This effect arises from the joint emergence of an energy gap in the free photonic dispersion relation and a discrete frequency at the gap's center. The latter corresponds to a bound normal mode stemming solely from the finiteness of the array length. Depending on which cavity …