Controlled manipulation of light by cooperative response of atoms in an optical lattice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how cooperative atomic responses in an optical lattice enable precise, subwavelength control and manipulation of light through tailored collective excitations driven by dipole-dipole interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control light at subwavelength scales by exploiting collective atomic modes in an optical lattice with tailored incident light.

Findings

Collective excitation modes can be selectively addressed.

Optical excitations can be localized at specific lattice sites.

The approach enables subwavelength light manipulation.

Abstract

We show that a cooperative atom response in an optical lattice to resonant incident light can be employed for precise control and manipulation of light on a subwavelength scale. Specific collective excitation modes of the system that result from strong light-mediated dipole-dipole interactions can be addressed by tailoring the spatial phase-profile of the incident light. We demonstrate how the collective response can be used to produce optical excitations at well-isolated sites on the lattice.