Dark energy appears to be the dominant component of the physical Universe, yet there is no persuasive theoretical explanation for its existence or magnitude. The acceleration of the Universe is, along with dark matter, the observed phenomenon that most directly demonstrates that our theories of fundamental particles and gravity are either incorrect or incomplete. Most experts believe that nothing short of a revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics will be required to achieve a full understanding of the cosmic acceleration. For these reasons, the nature of dark energy ranks among the very most compelling of all outstanding problems in physical science. These circumstances demand an ambitious observational program to determine the dark energy properties as well as possible.
We consider the cosmological implications of light travelling faster in the early Universe. We propose a prescription for deriving corrections to the cosmological evolution equations while the speed of light c is changing. We then show how the horizon, flatness, and cosmological constant problems may be solved. We also study cosmological perturbations in this scenario and show how one may solve the homogeneity and isotropy problems. As it stands, our scenario appears to most easily produce extreme homogeneity, requiring structure to be produced in the Standard Big Bang epoch. Producing significant perturbations during the earlier epoch would require a rather careful design of the function c(t). The large entropy inside the horizon nowadays can also be accounted for in this scenario.
A central goal within quantum optics is to realize efficient, controlled interactions between photons and atomic media. A fundamental limit in nearly all applications based on such systems arises from spontaneous emission, in which photons are absorbed by atoms and then re-scattered into undesired channels. In typical theoretical treatments of atomic ensembles, it is assumed that this re-scattering occurs independently, and at a rate given by a single isolated atom, which in turn gives rise to standard limits of fidelity in applications such as quantum memories for light or photonic quantum gates. However, this assumption can in fact be dramatically violated. In particular, it has long been known that spontaneous emission of a collective atomic excitation can be significantly suppressed through strong interference in emission between atoms. While this concept of "subradiance" is not new, thus far the techniques to exploit the effect have not been well-understood. In this work, we provide a comprehensive treatment of this problem. First, we show that in ordered atomic arrays in free space, subradiant states acquire an elegant interpretation in terms of optical modes that are guided by the array, which only emit due to scattering from the ends of the finite system. We also go beyond the typically studied regime of a single atomic excitation, and elucidate the properties of subradiant states in the many-excitation limit. Finally, we introduce the new concept of "selective radiance." Whereas subradiant states experience a reduced coupling to all optical modes, selectively radiant states are tailored to simultaneously radiate efficiently into a desired channel while scattering into undesired channels is suppressed, thus enabling an enhanced atom-light interface. We show that these states naturally appear in chains of atoms coupled to nanophotonic structures, and we analyze the performance of photon storage exploiting such states. We find numerically that selectively radiant states allow for a photon storage error that scales exponentially better with number of atoms than previously known bounds.PACS numbers: 42.50.Ct, 42.50.Nn || kz and J ⊥ kz , respectively) are given by:
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