Laser driven atoms in half-cavities

Abstract

The behavior of a two level atom in a half-cavity, i.e. a cavity with one mirror, is studied within the framework of a one dimensional model with respect to spontaneous decay and resonance fluorescence. The system under consideration corresponds to the setup of a recently performed experiment [J. Eschner \textit{et. al.}, Nature \textbf{413}, 495 (2001)] where the influence of a mirror on a fluorescing single atom was revealed. In the present work special attention is paid to a regime of large atom-mirror distances where intrinsic memory effects cannot be neglected anymore. This is done with the help of delay differential equations which contain, for small atom-mirror distances, the Markovian limit with effective level shifts and decay rates leading to the phenomenon of enhancement or inhibition of spontaneous decay. Several features are recovered beyond an effective Markovian treatment, appearing in experimental accessible quantities like intensity or emission spectra of the scattered light.