Abstract
Many-atom "vacuum" Rabi splitting has been observed in a number of experiments.1-3 The challenge now is to measure the vacuum Rabi spectrum for a single atom. In practical terms, the experiment is considerably more difficult. But the fundamental physics for one atom and for many atoms is the same. In both cases, vacuum Rabi splitting can be understood as the normal-mode splitting of a pair of coupled harmonic oscillators, one oscillator describing the cavity mode and the other describing the collective polarization of the atoms. In quantum mechanical language, vacuum Rabi splitting is the splitting of the first excited state of the coupled system of atoms plus cavity mode.
© 1992 Optical Society of America
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