2007/09/24 by A. Mazzei, S. Gotzinger, L. de S. Menezes +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.99.173603
accepted for publication in Pysical Review Letters
arxiv created 2007/09/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We present experiments where a single subwavelength scatterer is used to examine and control the back-scattering induced coupling between counterpropagating high-Q modes of a microsphere resonator. Our measurements reveal the standing wave character of the resulting symmetric and antisymmetric eigenmodes, their unbalanced intensity distributions, and the coherent nature of their coupling. We discuss our findings and the underlying classical physics in the framework common to quantum optics and provide a particularly intuitive explanation of the central processes.