Abstract

The boundary conditions imposed on the vacuum field by the superconfocal cavity (SCC) create a region of space, the active volume, at the cavity center in which the spectral structure of the vacuum field is perturbed. These perturbations transform the normally white spectrum of the free-space vacuum field into a colored vacuum whose spectrum is a comb of peaks coincident with the cavity resonance frequencies. Operating as designed, atoms resonant with the cavity and in the active region will experience a vacuum field mode density 1.5 times that in free-space. Perturbations in the vacuum field mode density of this magnitude and operative over so large an active volume (1.4 × 10⁷µm³) have not, to our knowledge, been previously achieved in an open optical cavity. We expect to observe a plethora of new and novel phenomena associated with laser–atom interactions in the presence of a colored vacuum. The first experiment will focus on the dynamic suppression of spontaneous emission¹ which predicts a dramatic narrowing of the central Mollow peak as the Rabi frequency becomes larger than the FWHM of the SCC-induced peaks in the vacuum field mode density.

© 1991 Optical Society of America