Selective Radiance in Super-Wavelength Atomic Arrays

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that selective radiance in atomic arrays can be achieved with super-wavelength spacing by stacking multiple layers, enabling efficient atom-light interfaces without the need for dense sub-wavelength arrays.

Contribution

It introduces a method to achieve selective radiance in super-wavelength atomic arrays by stacking layers, relaxing the need for dense sub-wavelength configurations.

Findings

Super-wavelength arrays can eliminate unwanted diffraction modes.

Near-perfect reflection of weak resonant light is achievable.

Quantum memories with low error probabilities are feasible with ~100 atoms per layer.

Abstract

A novel way to create efficient atom-light interfaces is to engineer collective atomic states that selectively radiate into a target optical mode by suppressing emission into undesired modes through destructive interference. While it is generally assumed that this approach requires dense atomic arrays with sub-wavelength lattice constants, here we show that selective radiance can also be achieved in arrays with super-wavelength spacing. By stacking multiple two-dimensional arrays we find super-wavelength mirror configurations where one can eliminate emission into unwanted diffraction orders while enhancing emission into the desired specular mode, leading to near-perfect reflection of weak resonant light. These super-wavelength arrays can also be functionalized into efficient quantum memories, with error probabilities on the order of ~1 for a trilayer with only around ~100 atoms per layer. Relaxing the previous constraint of sub-wavelength spacing could potentially ease the technical requirements for realizing efficient atom-light interfaces, such as enabling the use of tweezer arrays.