Abstract

Optical cavities facilitate the detection of particles, as has been demonstrated with atomic systems [1-4], where single atom detection is performed routinely exploiting near-resonant light. Applying these near-resonant methods to more complex particles is likely to fail: the internal structure of molecules, e.g., hardly ever provides the strong closed transitions found in many atomic systems, so that cycling more than one photon becomes difficult without changing the internal state of the molecule. A possible solution is to use off-resonant light and couple the molecules to a cavity to enhance the coherent Rayleigh scattering in a Purcell-like manner.

© 2009 IEEE