Photon creation in a resonant cavity with a nonstationary plasma mirror and its detection with Rydberg atoms

Abstract

We investigate the dynamical Casimir effect and its detection with Rydberg atoms. The photons are created in a resonant cavity with a plasma mirror of a semiconductor slab which is irradiated by periodic laser pulses. The canonical Hamiltonian is derived for the creation and annihilation operators, showing the explicit time variation in the couplings, which originates from the external configuration such as a nonstationary plasma mirror. The number of created photons is evaluated as squeezing from the Heisenberg equations with the Hamiltonian. Then the detection of the photons as the atomic excitations is examined through the atom-field interaction. Some consideration is made for a feasible experimental realization with a semiconductor plasma mirror.

Influence of periodically modulated cavity field on the generation of atomic-squeezed states

“…The results discussed above on the generation of atomic squeezed state by DCE can be realized with the help of practical schemes recently proposed for the generation and detection of DCE photons [13,14]. As mentioned before both the schemes have proposed to use the cavities operating in the GHz regime.…”

“…For example, it has been shown in Ref. [13] that using a semiconductor plasma mirror [45] with Q of the order 10 3 it is possible to achieve the so-called threshold condition for generation of squeezed photons. Therefore, we expect that a beam of Rydberg atoms interacting with the field mode of this cavity will be able to produce significant amount of atomic squeezing.…”

“…In particular we focus our attention on the effect of modulation of the cavity mode frequency due to harmonic oscillation of the cavity mirror on the squeezing properties of an ensemble of atoms interacting with this cavity mode. Here we wish to note that dynamics of N-two level atoms in a non-stationary cavity has already been investigated in the context of detection of photons generated in the cavity [11,13]. On the other hand, in the present work we concentrate on the generation of atomic squeezed state in a non-stationary cavity.…”

“…On the other hand, Ref. [13] explored the possibility of using a cavity with plasma mirror made from semiconductor slab irradiated by periodic laser pulses for generation of photons from vacuum state and Rydberg atoms with large values of principal quantum number for detection of these photons.…”

“…Keeping these difficulties in mind recently two proposals for experimental generation and detection of photons in non-stationary cavities have been reported in Refs. [13] and [14]. In Ref.…”