Abstract

The use of laser-cooling techniques in optical cavity QED¹ effects a dramatic separation of dynamical timescales, with the coherent interaction rate g₀ dominating over both the cavity field decay rate κ and the atomic dipole decay rate γ_⊥, which are in turn much larger than rates T^-1 associated with atomic motion through the spatially varying cavity eigenmode. Below we describe two separate ongoing experiments that explore phenomena uniquely accessible in this regime of true coupling.

© 1998 Optical Society of America